


here's looking at you, kid

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And Incidentally So Can This Nine-Year-Old Girl, Angst, Book References, Canon-Typical Violence, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak-centric, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Found Family, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slow Burn, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Stanley Uris Lives, Team Bonding Accelerated By The Need To Protect One (1) Child, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), [Chanting] DAD EDDIE DAD EDDIE DAD EDDIE
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 72,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23173354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: “I’m not sure I know,” Bill replied, “but I think w-we’re all childless. Is that ih-it?”There was a moment of shocked silence.“Yeah,” Mike said. “That’s it.”But that’s in a different universe. Inthisone, only five of the seven losers are childless. In this one, Stanley Uris throws out every razor he owns and books a flight to Bangor before he can change his mind or come to his senses, and he kisses his wife and his three kids goodbye on his way out the door.And about twelve hundred miles away, Eddie Kaspbrak is already well over halfway to Derry when he pulls over on I-95…… and he finds his nine-year-old daughter hiding in his trunk.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 243
Kudos: 369





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> to those of you reading my other wips… yeah, i have nothing to say for myself
> 
> huge shout out to [@seven-syntheseas](https://seven-syntheseas.tumblr.com/) for fueling this fire via tumblr chat and giving me SO many good ideas, including but not limited to eddie’s daughter’s full name as you’ll see below
> 
>  **warnings for this chapter:** MAJOR warning for **suicidal thoughts** at the beginning! stanley does not do it, but he absolutely does think about it, so if that’s a trigger for you, at the beginning of stan's scene ctrl+f “roughly” to skip it. as for minor warnings: memory problems (obviously), vomiting, eddie being an unreliable narrator about his childhood and his mother and his wife and things that he should think are fucked up but doesn’t (yet), heteronormativity, a dad yelling at his kid, and richie making a slightly anti-semitic joke that's pulled from something he says in the book

_“There’s one other thing we six have in common. I wonder if any of you have realized what that is.”_

_It was Bill’s turn to open his mouth and then shut it again._

_“Go on,” Mike said. “You know what it is. I can see it on your face.”_

_“I’m not sure I know,” Bill replied, “but I think w-we’re all childless. Is that ih-it?”_

_There was a moment of shocked silence._

_“Yeah,” Mike said. “That’s it.”_

_“Jesus Christ Almighty!” Eddie spoke up indignantly. “What in the world does that have to do with the price of beans in Peru? What gave you the idea that everyone in the world has to have kids? That’s nuts!”_

_“Do you and your wife have children?” Mike asked._

_“If you’ve been keeping track of us all the way you said, then you know goddamn well we don’t. But I still say it doesn’t mean a damn thing.”_

In the great wide expanse of the Macroverse, with every possible path laid out in front of them, an incomprehensible megalithic Turtle at the root of all things watches, and observes, and thinks. And when the end comes around again, as it always does, they let out a disgruntled little huff that seems quite out of place for an incomprehensible megalithic Turtle at the root of all things.

HMPH, they say aloud to the Macroverse, though no one is around to hear them. THAT WON’T DO.

Really, the Turtle had never meant to take a stand in such matters — and indeed, had never _been_ meant to take a stand in such matters. They had vomited up the whole of the Universe, and from there, well, everything has its place, doesn’t it? Muck-filled quarries and collapsing nebulae and the chewing gum stuck under a McDonald’s table and everything in between.

Energy is eternal. Or mostly eternal, anyway. Not that it makes much difference.

But hey, everyone’s allowed to get a little sentimental every now and again, right? Even an incomprehensible megalithic Turtle at the root of all things. Hell, _especially_ an incomprehensible megalithic Turtle at the root of all things.

With that in mind, the Turtle lifts one great wide expanse of a claw, and they tap one of the lines of fate into something that’s essentially the same, if a little bit to the left.

THERE, the turtle says. MAYBE THAT’LL FINALLY DO IT.

YEESH.

Stanley Uris takes a bath.

Well.

He _runs_ one, anyway.

Hot water glugs its way into the tub on its highest setting and splashes violently on the porcelain, scattering droplets in a rainbow spray on the linoleum wall tile high above the rim of the tub. Steam billows up in great choking clouds, plunging the room into an almost stifling humidity as Stanley stands, fully clothed and quivering and breathless with a white-knuckled grip on either side of the bathroom sink, and he thinks of all those terrible dreams, the dreams that always faded, the way dreams do. He thinks of everything he told Patty in those quiet heart-pounding moments as the nightmares relaxed their grip on his subconscious.

 _Sometimes,_ he told her, _sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and think, ‘I know now. I know what’s wrong.’_

_Everything that’s wrong with my life— I don’t mean from inside, Babylove, you know that. From inside is fine._

_I’m talking about outside._

_Something that should be over but isn’t._

_I wake up from these dreams and think, ‘My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don’t understand.’_

_I’m afraid, Pat._

Now, clutching the sides of the bathroom sink like a porcelain life raft, Stanley thinks: The storm is here.

The storm has been waiting over the horizon and now it’s hurdling at him at light fucking speed and he’s trapped, watching paralyzed with fear and unable to do a damn thing about it. The sky’s turning gray-black and crackling and there’s thunder rumbling through the ground and the wind’s picking up, and the storm is _here,_ and—

And he is not going to survive it.

His reflection is muddled with steam, nothing but a peach-pink blob, but somehow Stanley thinks he can see himself there— not himself here, not himself now, not himself at forty but at thirteen. Bandaging wrapped all the way around his head, curls poking out from the top, tiny reddish blots showing in a ring around his face.

Teeth.

All he can see is rows upon rows of teeth.

Stanley doesn’t think he blacks out. All he knows is that one second he’s standing, and the next he’s on the floor with a hard throb in his tailbone.

Fucking _teeth._ A woman’s face, distorted and bent the wrong way and _smiling._

_You won’t survive this._

_You’re scared out of your fucking mind and you don’t even know why yet._

_Just wait until you figure it out. Just wait until the picture’s all filled in._

_You’re too weak to do this. You’re the weak link that’ll get the rest of them killed and you damn well know it._

_You need to take yourself off the board._

There’s a knock on the door, then, a rapid knock to the tune of _shave and a haircut,_ so upbeat and innocent that it feels to Stanley like it comes from an entirely different plane of reality. It’s jarring. The thought of his razors in the medicine cabinet, formerly in residence at the forefront of his mind, lags back half a step.

And then:

“Daddy?”

Oh, God.

He’d been thinking about _that_ and he hadn’t even stopped for a moment to consider—

His stomach turns, and Stanley stumbles to his knees and lurches toward the toilet. He makes it in the knick of time, fingers gripping the edge of the toilet seat as everything he’s eaten today comes flooding its way up his esophagus.

Past the ringing in his ears and the still splashing water in the tub, he hears the doorknob jiggle.

“Daddy? Are you okay?”

It’s Ava. His youngest. Five years old and unfailingly concerned every time her father leaves her direct line of sight for more than a few minutes.

Five years old and very nearly _fatherless_ if he’d—

“I’m— I’m fine, sweetie pie,” Stan croaks out, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His voice echoes oddly in the toilet bowl, and he’s crying now, and it has almost nothing to do with the tremors in his stomach and the twinging of his throat. “Think I ate something bad.”

“You wanna ginger ale and crackers?”

“Oh, no, no, I’m okay. I… I feel a lot better now.”

“You sure?”

“Yup,” Stan drops his forehead onto his arm, which has gone cold and clammy in his terror so that it’s _actually_ kind of pleasantly cool against his overheating face. He bites down a sob before it can make itself heard and says, “Yeah, I’m fine. Go back downstairs and I’ll— I’ll be there in a few minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

He holds his breath, counts down from ten as slowly as possible, and once he’s certain that Ava must be out of earshot by now, he _finally_ crumbles and lets the tears come. His stomach clenches and his throat aches something horrible, but he cries in great big heaving gasps anyway with one hand clamped over his mouth and his forehead tucked into the crook of his elbow.

Then, when the tears have run their course and he feels like every ounce of strength in his body has been sapped away, Stanley flushes the toilet, reaches over to turn off the bathtub faucet, and slowly and shakily picks himself up off the floor to stand on legs that already feel like Jell-O.

He grits his teeth and marches up to the medicine cabinet.

 _Fuck you,_ Stanley thinks with bitter resentment, not sure whether he’s directing that thought at the distorted woman of his memories or something else, something darker, something far far worse that he can’t quite comprehend just yet. He bites down on that terror, grips it and yanks it back and channels it into fury, because that’s the only way he knows he’ll stay this course.

_Fuck you and the horse you rode in on._

_I’m staying on the board, asshole, and I’m coming to kick you off of it._

_Fucking watch me._

Roughly one thousand, one hundred, and thirty miles away from Atlanta, at the exact same instant that Stanley Uris dumps every razor he owns into the garbage and begins searching on his phone for one-way flights to Bangor International, Eddie Kaspbrak crosses over the state line into Maine.

And the thing is, that doesn’t mean he’s close to getting where he’s going. Maine is an almost _insultingly_ huge state. Eddie is officially over the state line and there’s still another two and a half hours of road between him and Bangor, two and a half hours of one- or two-lane highway pavement threading its way through green-brown hilltops and fog strewn valleys, and there will be another hour and ten minutes of driving left to go after _that_ before he sets foot in Derry, Maine, for the first time in over two decades.

Over two decades. Jesus.

And yet, somehow, he still remembers exactly how to get there. Hasn’t opened the maps app once, which, if he’s being honest, is only about forty percent due to lack of need and about sixty percent due to a bone-deep anxiety whenever he so much as _contemplates_ waking the screen of his phone to see how many calls he’s missed from his wife, but—

But the point is. The _point_ is:

How the hell does he remember this drive so clearly?

It doesn’t make any sense. He can’t remember the names of any of his elementary school teachers, can’t remember how old he was when he learned to ride a bike, is only _just_ beginning to remember what he can sense are the most important things, like the Barrens and the old movie theater, things like a thirteen-year-old girl’s hair flashing bright red in the sun and a small chubby boy’s laugh making his whole face squish up, things like coke bottle glasses and strawberry milkshakes and rocket pops. All of it’s there but not quite there, muddled in smog and slowly creeping its way into clarity.

But he remembers _this?_

It feels like muscle memory, but hell, even that can’t quite explain it, can it? He’s never _made_ this drive before. By the time he got behind the wheel of a car for the first time in his life, he’d already been living in Brooklyn for at least a year.

But somehow he knows. Two and a half hours from the state line to Bangor. An hour and ten from Bangor to Derry.

He just _knows._

The radio's playing at just under twenty-five percent volume, not loud enough to be a distraction but loud enough that it chips away at the endless monotony of I-95. Stevie Nicks is crooning about snow covered hills when he takes his attention away from the road for half a second, and the Escalade’s front right tire promptly _slams_ through a pothole that’s so rough it rattles his fucking teeth.

There’s a _kerthunk_ from behind the very back seat where he’s stowed his suitcases, and then another _thud_ that must be one of said suitcases falling over.

God fucking damn it.

“Fucking Maine,” Eddie mutters. “Why don’t you refill some fucking potholes with all those goddamn tax dollars, huh?”

As if in direct answer to his very rhetorical question, his phone buzzes in the cupholder.

His frustration immediately coalesces back into that ever-present pit at the bottom of his stomach, and he leans his head back against the car seat with his eyes on the road and his jaw set and his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

The phone vibrates four, five, six, and finally seven times before it goes to his already full voicemail box.

Myra has called him no less than fifty times in the four hours he’s been on the road, and for the first sixteen calls, he actually answered.

The calls seemed to change the further he got away, the more miles he put between himself and Manhattan. Myra varying up her tactics the clearer it became that Eddie wasn’t turning the car around any time soon.

First it was _oh, Eddie, come home, this isn’t like you, you’re not feeling well—_ which, fair. This is very much not like him, and the anxiety and the baseless (is it baseless?) fear roiling around in his stomach would definitely qualify as “not feeling well.”

But she very conveniently blew straight past what was technically the most important thing he’d said before he left, never once so much as indicating that she even heard him utter the word “divorce.” And then _Eddie, come home, this isn’t like you,_ became _Eddie, this stress will kill you, think of your health,_ and then it was _Eddie, think of_ my _health, what if something happens while you’re gone?_

Then she started pulling out any excuse she could cook up, lies ranging from little things like _the refrigerator is making a weird noise Eddie I don’t know how to fix it what if all our food spoils you need to get back here and look at it,_ to the more serious ones like _I need to go to the doctor right away I’m feeling faint and you know I can’t drive myself Eddie—_

He stopped answering after that, and the phone calls have tapered off from once every two minutes to once every fifteen or twenty. Baby steps.

Now, though, when the phone’s buzzing stops, it doesn’t fall away and let the rolling of the tires over pavement and the low-playing radio take back over.

This time, it picks right back up again.

Seven buzzes, then a brief lull, and then—

Again. That’s three calls in a row, back to back, no hesitation between redials.

Eddie thumps his head back against the seat, grits his teeth for a second, sighs heavily through his nose, and grabs the phone in the middle of its fourth call in a row. He picks it up with the sort of swiftness that makes changing his mind or chickening out pretty much impossible, which is the only way he’s learned to do things that scare him in forty years. Just don’t even give yourself the time to fucking think about it. Easy as that.

“Myra, I— Myra, slow down, I can’t even tell what you’re—” Eddie tries to get a word in, and fuck, he’d started off all puffed up and angry and ready to talk her down, but now she _actually_ sounds like she’s in hysterics. Like, genuine fucking hysterics, waterworks and everything. His bravado falls away by increments.

And then swells right back up again.

Because seriously? This is the tactic she’s going with now?

 _“Myra!”_ Eddie all but screams into the phone. “Myra, slow down, I cannot answer you if I don’t know _what the fuck you’re saying!”_

That, at least, seems to get through to her. He hears her take a few wet, trembling breaths before she continues, only marginally less hysterical but at least a little bit intelligible, “I don’t know what to do, I’ve called the police and I’ve called all of her friends’ parents and I’ve called all of her teachers and—”

Just like that, the bravado is officially gone. Eddie’s heart sinks into his stomach.

“Myra. What are you talking about?”

 _“Frannie!”_ Myra screams, confirming his fears as she halfway dissolves into sobs again. “She— she never went to school today and— and— I tried calling her first, but she hasn’t answered any of my calls and— and—”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Eddie says, immediately signaling and getting over into the shoulder so he can park. It’s not safe to park on the side of a highway, not technically, but _fuck,_ neither is driving when his heart’s racing like this.

Where the fuck is his inhaler?

Whatever. He’ll find it in a second. Fuck.

“What do you mean, she didn’t go to school?” Eddie asks, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. “I _saw_ her at school, I stopped there before I left—”

“What? No, M— Mr. Black called and he— he— he said she never came to school, and he thought we’d k— k— kept her home sick, but I told him—”

“Okay, wait, no, I saw her, Myra. I mean I literally stopped at her school, and I saw her get off the bus, and I pulled her aside to tell her where I was going and to say bye to her,” Eddie recounts, because that’s exactly what goddamn _happened,_ because there had been this weird feeling at the time that he should stop and say bye to her and he had no idea why, but once it was in his head he couldn’t shake it, not until he’d seen her. “She was there. I even watched her go back inside the school.”

He also sat at the side of the road for another twenty minutes trying to control his breathing while he started to consider the merits of ignoring Mike’s call after all, but Myra doesn’t need to know that.

Oh, God, what if something happened to Fran while he was sitting _right there_ outside her school?

Shit, shit, shit. He has to turn around.

“I _saw_ her,” he says again, trying to ground himself in a reality where his daughter is totally one-hundred-percent safe, because otherwise Myra will not be the only one dissolving into hysterics and he can’t do that when he’s all the way in _fucking Maine._ “She goes to _the_ safest school in the goddamn city, so how in the hell could they have lost track of her between then and now, huh? How in the—”

There’s another _thud_ from the general direction of his suitcases.

Eddie stops short.

Because here’s the thing, and here’s the thing he _fucking forgot_ until just now: when he left, he packed everything he could possibly need by any stretch of the imagination. He packed his full-to-bursting suitcases in the back like it was a game of goddamn Tetris. A giant pothole like the one about a mile back, the one that probably fucked up his suspension and the air level in his front right tire, that one might have been enough to dislodge one of his suitcases. _Maybe._

But then what the hell could have…?

Oh, fucking Christ.

With the phone still held to his ear, Eddie unbuckles his seatbelt, double checks his hazards, and waits for a lull in the traffic before throwing the driver’s side door open and circling to the back of the Escalade in a few quick strides. Myra’s already yelling in his ear again, or half-yelling half-crying in her panic, but Eddie has already made the rounds from panicked to relieved to _really goddamn pissed off_ by the time he unlocks the hatchback and lifts it up to peer into his truck.

Yeah. Being this relieved and this pissed off at once is… an experience. Not a fucking pleasant one.

“Myra,” he says into the phone, pinching the bridge of his nose again. “Myra, she’s— _Myra,_ listen to me, she’s fine. Fran’s fine.”

“W— what? What do you mean she’s—?”

“I mean she’s fine. She snuck into my car before I left her school, so she’s going to be _grounded for the rest of her life,”_ Eddie adds, dropping his hand from his face so that he can send a pointed look at the wide-eyed nine-year-old who’s wedged herself between his second suitcase and his toiletry bag, her hot pink backpack hugged against her stomach, “but she’s fine. She’s safe. Just…”

He takes a breath, and then, because he’s belatedly feeling like a dick for blowing up on his wife the moment he picked up the phone, he softens his voice and adds, “Go drink some water and relax for a second, okay? Fran’s okay. I’ll… take care of this. Promise.”

With that, he ends the call before Myra can get another word in, and then he slides the phone into his back pocket so he has both hands free to put on his hips, and he levels his daughter with what he can only hope is the harshest glare she has ever seen in her entire goddamn life.

She watches him, shrinking down a bit so that her chin and mouth end up hidden behind the top of her backpack and all he can see are her wide brown eyes and her tiny nose and the freckles on her forehead.

“In my defense—”

 _“Do. Not. Start,”_ Eddie cuts her off, and she shrinks down a little further so her nose disappears behind hot pink nylon, too. He has no fucking clue where she’s heard the phrase _in my defense_ before, but he’d guess it’s somewhere in one of the several chapter books sitting in that backpack right now. She gets in trouble for reading a chapter book under her desk during math class at _least_ once a week.

He huffs, takes a step back and says, “Get out of the trunk.”

“But—”

“Francine Muriel Augusta Kaspbrak. Get out. Of the trunk. Now.”

She does, although she’s wedged her hips so firmly between his suitcases that it takes a couple seconds of shimmying before she makes it to the Escalade’s bumper. She hesitates there, her legs dangling and her backpack still held tight to her chest, so Eddie huffs another sigh and helps her down.

And as blindingly angry as he is, he also really, really, _really_ badly wants to hug her the second her shoes hit the asphalt. There was a solid thirty seconds there during which he’d already been running kidnapping statistics in his head, and it was a _very scary_ thirty seconds, and now she’s right in front of him, whole and alive and safe, even if she’s in a whole world of trouble.

But hugging her would send some seriously mixed signals about exactly _how much_ trouble she’s in, so he doesn’t.

“Front seat,” he says instead, pointing. “Buckle your seatbelt, and— oh, my God, you’ve been in the car for _four hours_ and you weren’t wearing a—” Eddie cuts himself off, groans loud enough that it honest-to-God _echoes_ against the hills surrounding them on either side, and he continues, “Okay. Okay. Front seat. Buckle your seatbelt, and do not say a word until I say so. Got it?”

Fran nods so quick it’s more of a twitch than anything else, and then she’s all but sprinting around the car to the passenger side door.

Eddie stays where he is, glaring at the tiny empty space she’d hidden herself in, hands still on his hips. He closes his eyes. Takes a few deep breaths. Counts down from twenty, gets down to zero and realizes he’s still mad, then counts down from forty.

Then he opens his eyes, slams the hatchback shut, and stalks around to the driver side door.

Once he’s inside and buckled, the two of them just sit there, neither of them speaking while the engine idles, while Maine’s idea of traffic — that is, maybe a car every ten seconds or so, and that’s being generous — whizzes by. The radio’s still playing, and now Stevie Nicks is singing _it’ll be better than before, yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone…_

Must be a marathon or something.

Eddie takes one last deep breath, runs both hands over his face, and says, “Okay. Speak.”

Frannie does not waste a second, blurting out the words like they’d been crammed behind her teeth. “How much trouble am I in?”

Eddie barks a loud, humorless laugh. “How much trouble are you in? Huh, gee! Let’s think. You remember when Bradley got caught drawing in permanent marker all over the walls in your school?”

He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, just in time to see hers widen.

“I’m in _that_ much trouble?”

“You _wish_ you were only in that much trouble.”

“What?!” Fran finally stops hugging her backpack, turning toward him as much as she can with the seatbelt still buckled. “But Bradley got detention for a whole month!”

“And you’re gonna be grounded for a whole lot longer than one lousy month!” Eddie shouts, finally losing the battle to keep his voice level. “This is the stupidest, most irresponsible thing you have _ever_ done! I mean, what the hell were you _thinking?_ You know your mom thought you were _kidnapped?_ She called me, _crying_ her eyes out on the phone because she thought you were gone forever, and it turns out you just decided to stow away in my car for a little joyride! She didn’t know where you were, I didn’t know where you were,” he goes on, jabbing himself in the sternum as he gesticulates all over the place, “and I mean, Jesus, do you have _any idea_ how scary that is? Do you?”

“No, but—”

“But nothing! And no, you _don’t_ know how scary that is! You just hopped on in here anyway, you weren’t thinking about _anyone_ else, and—”

“I _was!”_ Fran yells, or… well, sort of yells. She gets her voice as loud as she can even though she’s got her head ducked down and is busy stubbornly scrubbing her eyes with both hands, because she’s started crying now and she _hates_ crying. She’s always hated crying, always tried to get it over and done with as quick as possible, always, every single time since she was old enough to walk.

Which also means if Frannie cries, it’s because she genuinely couldn’t help it. She didn’t even do alligator tears as a toddler.

Just about every ounce of wind in Eddie’s sails dies out right then and there.

“Hey, no, I— okay,” Eddie sighs, tamping down on the anger and taking yet another breath to steady himself. He reaches out and lays a hand on her back, gently rubbing up and down. He can’t say it’s alright, because it’s still not, but he _can_ say, “It’s not the end of the world. I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to… you know, yell so much. I was just scared.”

Fran sniffs, scrubbing her eyes dry. “I didn’t mean to make Mom cry either, and I didn’t mean to make her think I was kidnapped or make you scared, but Mom wouldn’t have let me come with you and _you_ wouldn’t have let me come with you, either!”

“Well, congrats,” Eddie tells her, still careful to keep his voice gentle as he keeps rubbing her back. “You managed to hitchhike for about two hundred sixty miles before you got caught. That’s a pretty solid rebellion for a kid your age.”

“Wait, two hundred—? We’re still gonna go the rest of the way, right?”

“Uh, no?”

“What? Why not?”

“Because— what do you mean, why not? Are you out of your mind? We’re turning right around and I’m dropping you off at home, and then—”

“But you can’t!” Fran cries, even though all that’s left of her actual tears is a little blotchiness to her cheeks and a stray sniffle or two.

“Oh, okay, I can’t,” Eddie says, dripping sarcasm, and he retracts his hand so he can cross his arms. “No, go on, please remind me who’s the grown up in this relationship. I must have forgotten.”

“It doesn’t _matter_ that you’re a grown up! Sometimes grown ups need help, too, and you said you were going far away and you were acting so _weird_ and I was really worried and—”

“Wait, weird?” Eddie raises an eyebrow. “What do you mean, I was acting weird? I wasn’t acting weird.”

“Yeah, you _were._ You were saying you were gonna go really far away, and you were acting really weird about it. Like, kinda sad and kinda like… like you were scared, but not, like, a normal kind of scared? I don’t know, you were just being really weird!” Fran yells, throwing her hands up in a full-body shrug. “And I thought maybe you were gonna go really far away and then you were gonna get lost, or something was gonna happen and then you weren’t gonna be able to get back, but I figured if I went with you it might be better, because I have my first aid kit and my extra Epi-pen and I’m really good with maps and stuff so you won’t get lost as easy while I’m with you, and it’s always safer if you have somebody else with you, and— and you said you were going to a whole different _state!_ I’ve never even got to go outside the city before ‘cause you and Mom wouldn’t let me go on that field trip to the Poconos and this is _so much_ farther away than that!”

Eddie nods, frowning like he’s following along. Then narrows his eyes at her. “Hm. Okay. So did you sneak into the car because you were worried about me, or because you were excited about going somewhere far away? You gotta get your story straight.”

She chews on her cheek, then shrugs again. “Can’t it be both?”

Eddie snorts, shaking his head and looking out his own window so she can’t see him smiling.

“Okay, really though,” he says as he turns back to her, fixing her with another carefully stern look. “This was astronomically stupid, and you are still in _so much trouble_ it's insane. No nine-year-old in the history of nine-year-olds has ever been in as much trouble as you are in right now. Convicted serial killers in maximum security prisons will see how badly you’re grounded and think, _oh, wow, that sucks!_ You understand?”

A tiny smile shows up on her face. “But…?”

“But nothing!”

“But _Dad!”_

“But! Nothing!” Eddie shouts, cutting his hand through the air. “End of conversation! I am taking you back home! No buts!”

“But we already drove for so long!” she continues, unimpeded. She points at the dashboard clock. “It’s already lunchtime, and by the time we get back home it’ll be almost _dinner_ time, and by then everybody’s gonna be driving around so there’s gonna be a ton of traffic, so you won’t be able to get out of the city until at least six, and you’ll have to go all the way back up here after that, and _you_ told me that the majority of traffic accidents happen when people drive at night and driving for more than a couple hours makes people’s brains go all fuzzy and driving tired is as bad as driving drunk, and even if you _don’t_ get in an accident you could still get lost because Maine is really big and really empty and not like New York at _all_ and you might need help, and you _know_ I never get lost, _so—”_

“Oh, my God,” Eddie laughs when she pauses for breath. He’s already folded his arms on the steering wheel and dropped his cheek onto them, watching her impassioned rant.

Is any kid on the planet as ridiculous as his kid? Was _he_ this ridiculous as a kid? Is that even possible?

Fran asks, “What?”

“Nothing. Did you rehearse this?”

She makes a face, wrinkling her nose like she’s offended at the very notion that she might not have spun all of that off the top of her head. “No! I just know that it’s dangerous to—”

“Okay,” Eddie softly interrupts.

It immediately, visibly knocks her off kilter. She clearly had more of an argument prepared.

She leans back in her seat, arms crossed in a mirror image of him not thirty seconds ago, and she asks, “Okay…?”

“As in, okay, you can come with me,” Eddie tells her, and as her eyes light up he adds, “on a few conditions.”

Her face falls. “What kinda conditions?”

“You do not leave my sight once for this entire trip, you do everything I say when I say it, no buts, and you call your mother back right now and let her know you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere,” Eddie tells her, putting the car back in drive and checking the side view mirror.

When he glances back at her, she’s wrinkling her nose again. “You already told Mom I was okay. And why would I be in a ditch?”

“Not the point.”

There’s hardly any traffic at all, so it doesn’t take more than a few seconds for Eddie to deem it safe enough to pull back onto the road. The speedometer ticks up to twenty, forty, then hovers around sixty, and Eddie again squashes down the sharp stab of panic at the fact that he’d been going twenty over the limit for most of this drive with his _daughter unbuckled in the fucking trunk._

Jesus Christ.

“Call your mother, tell her you are not dead or kidnapped, and you’re safe, and you are _very, very sorry_ for scaring her like you did, and that I’ll have you back home by the end of the weekend.”

She seems to take that well enough, saying nothing else as she digs her arm shoulder-deep into her backpack, tongue poking out between her lips in concentration until she’s managed to fish out her cell phone. She sits back, either scrolling through all her missed calls or staring at a blank black screen, it’s hard to tell when Eddie’s eyes are on the road.

Then she asks, apropos of absolutely fucking nothing:

“Are you guys getting a divorce?”

And Eddie _swears to God_ he almost loses control of the car.

“I— huh? What? I mean, why would you think—?”

“I heard you on the phone a couple hours ago when you didn’t know I was here,” she says, and fuck, that’s right. Of course she did. “You were all, _did you forget what I said about getting a divorce?_ And you sounded real upset about it, and—”

“Honey, I could have been talking about anyone else—”

“— and you just said you were gonna get _me_ home by the end of the weekend,” she adds, and when Eddie glances at her she’s sitting almost sideways in the seat, facing him. “You said me, not both of us. That makes it sound like you don’t live there anymore, or you’re not gonna live there anymore really soon, because you’re gonna move out and get a different apartment ‘cause you and Mom got a divorce.”

For a moment, Eddie doesn’t say anything to that, and it’s only partially due to the lump in his throat.

Mostly it’s because he doesn’t want to lie to her.

Because he’d known the second Mike called him. As soon as he realized something was missing, something was _wrong,_ he had somehow immediately understood that he couldn’t stay with Myra another day. He couldn’t keep pretending that their relationship wasn’t sucking the life out of him day in and day out, couldn’t pretend it wasn’t sucking the life out of _both_ of them day in and day out. And the most fucked up part about it was that he’d already known on some level for _so long_ that this wasn’t healthy, that he was just going through the motions and letting his entire life speed past without _doing_ anything about it, and then—

Out of nowhere, he just knew. He knew this was it, this was the end, this was where everything was changing and he would have no choice but to change with it or— or nothing, it wasn’t a choice at all.

He just knew, like he _just knew_ how to drive from Manhattan to a small town in rural Maine that he hasn’t seen in two decades.

“Frannie—”

“Daddy, it’s okay.”

And, well, _that_ sure throws him for a loop.

Eddie looks at her again, only to find nothing but innocent understanding in her eyes before he turns back to the road.

He gulps. “Is it?”

“Mm-hmm.” The seat creaks as she leans back again, facing forward. “Charlotte’s mom and dad got a divorce and they’re friends now, you know, like, how a boyfriend and girlfriend can break up and still be friends? And Charlotte said she likes it better now because they don’t fight anymore and they’re all a lot happier and her dad’s new girlfriend is really nice _and_ she gets to have two Christmases every year. And you and mom could still be friends, too. You still have a lot in common because you both like gluten free waffles and you both like vacuuming even though the floor’s already clean and _obviously_ you both like me.”

Eddie presses his lips together, trying to hold back a smile. “That so?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And who said I like you?” Eddie asks. “Just because I love you doesn’t mean I _like_ you.”

She scoffs, eyes down on her phone. “You like me.”

“Yeah.” Eddie reaches across the center console and messes up her hair just to hear her whine and swat him away. “Yeah, I do.”

Frannie giggles, hair mussing apparently instantly forgiven, and then she curls up in her seat and props her shoes up on the dash, and Eddie promptly smacks them down.

“Feet on the floor.”

“But Dad—”

“What! Did I say! About no buts! Do you _know_ how dangerous it is to prop your feet up like that? If I get in a head-on collision, do you _want_ your brain to get impaled by your knees? Huh?”

She cringes. “Gross.”

“Yeah, exactly. Gross. Feet on the floor.”

She’s huffy about it, but she does as she’s told. Then she sighs loudly and tilts her head against the window, no doubt scrolling through pages upon pages of missed texts and calls from Myra, prepping herself for the very unpleasant conversation that’s sure to follow.

Like father, like daughter, apparently.

Eddie hesitates, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, and then he drops the stern tone and asks, “So, you really would be okay with it? If me and your mom… you know. You’d be okay with that?”

She shrugs without looking up from her phone and then says, like it’s just that simple, “Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

 _“Yes,_ Dad, I’m sure,” she groans, rolling her eyes. “Jeez. I’m nine and a half, I’m not five.”

This time Eddie really does laugh. The highway rolls out in front of them, long and twisting and strangely not so intimidating now that he knows he’s not alone. A green highway sign looms ahead, winding ever closer, and Eddie tells her, “Oh, of course, my mistake. You’re basically a grown up, huh?”

“Uh-huh. And don’t you forget it.”

The sign comes up, close enough to read before it disappears behind them:

BANGOR 168 MILES.

“So if you and Mom _do_ get a divorce, do you think you’re gonna get a girlfriend like Charlotte’s dad did?”

Eddie shoots her a look, then reaches across the table and stabs his fork into a hunk of tomato in her salad.

“Hey!”

“Why’re you so concerned about me getting a girlfriend, huh?” Eddie asks through a mouthful of tomato, ignoring her complaint. This restaurant they found off a random exit on I-95 is half-decent and came back with a perfect health inspection record after Eddie’s cursory search on his phone, but they kind of skimped on the toppings, hence why he’s invoking the Dad Tax and stealing some of hers. He swallows and says, “I am literally still married. It’s not even set in stone that we _are_ getting a divorce.”

“That’s why I said _if.”_

Eddie narrows his eyes at her, lets the silence hang for a beat, and then says, “No.”

“No, what?”

“As in, no, I’m not thinking about it. A girlfriend is the very last thing on my mind right now, okay?”

“Then why are we going all the way to a random town in Maine for no reason?”

Eddie pulls a face, tilting his head. “What, you think I have a secret girlfriend in Maine that I never thought to tell you about until now? That’s seriously why you think we came up here?”

Fran shrugs. “Then why _are_ we going to a random town in Maine, then?”

“Okay, first of all,” Eddie says, “it’s not a random town in Maine. It’s the town I grew up in.”

“I thought you grew up in New York.”

“No, I went to college in Manhattan, and before that I went to high school in Brooklyn, but way back when I was your age—”

“When dinosaurs roamed the Earth—”

“— uh-huh, thanks, way way way back then, that’s when I lived up here in a town called Derry. Didn’t move away from there until I was fifteen.”

“So we’re just coming up here to visit the place you grew up in?”

“Well, no,” Eddie admits. “We’re going because a friend of mine called me and— _not_ that kind of friend, relax. His name’s Mike. He called me and said he needed my help, so I’m going up there to… see if I can help.”

 _You gotta come back,_ Mike’s voice rings in his head. _We need you. We need everyone back._

Fran watches him with an unreadable expression on her face, which is both unnerving for a nine-year-old and, as Eddie is discovering rather quickly as he adjusts to her growing up, surprisingly commonplace. Then she pokes her fork around her plate and says, “I didn’t know you had friends.”

 _“Wow,”_ Eddie laughs, lightly kicking her leg under the table. “Rude.”

“No, I mean it,” she says, frowning up at him. “I never know you grew up so far away _and_ I never knew you had friends.”

Eddie opens his mouth, then shuts it, then leans back in his seat with his brows creased and his arms crossed.

“I have… friends. Obviously I have friends. What about Jeff?”

Fran makes a face like she smelled something gross, and he realizes why when she says, “The guy from your job that smells like a gym all the time?”

“I— yeah, that guy,” Eddie sighs, rolling his eyes. “And you only think he smells like that because you only see him after we both get back from the gym.”

“Okay, but he’s not, like, a _good_ friend. Like a really good kind of friend. Not like Mike.”

And Eddie—

Eddie means to say… something, but his breath sort of catches before he can.

Because really, he’d been fully expecting that sentence to end with one of _her_ friends’ names, not one of his, and, well, he’s mostly just thrown by the fact that she’s right. He can _feel_ that she’s right, and the most jarring thing of all is that somehow she was able to tell even when _he_ wasn’t able to.

Eddie is positive that he does not succeed in keeping the dumbstruck look off his face. He gulps; his mouth is suddenly dry, the way it always seems to get when he pokes too hard at that hard little knot of memory sitting in the back corner of his brain.

He recovers quickly. Or pretends to, anyway.

“And how would you know what kind of friend Mike is, huh? You’ve never even met him.”

Fran raises an eyebrow at him like he’s got a screw loose. “Uh, how about because you’re driving all the way to _Maine_ just because he said he needs help?”

And that… yeah, that’s fair. He wouldn’t have driven eight hours just for that one guy from the office that he sometimes works out with. He wouldn’t have picked up the phone through a haze of sudden irrational fear, wouldn’t have listened to the little something else that told him to ignore the fear and pick up, the little something else hidden deep beneath all that panic that was saying _it’s Mike holy shit it’s really Mike pick up the phone you asshole—_

Probably wouldn’t have gotten that nasty dent in the passenger side door, either. Eddie still doesn’t understand why he did that.

To be honest, he still doesn’t understand why he got back in the car, either, and why he was on the fucking interstate not an hour later.

“I… I think—” 

Eddie’s arms are vice-tight over his chest, and his heart is doing that skippy thing it always does a few minutes before he knows he’ll need his inhaler. He needs to explain this properly, though, if not to make it make sense in his own head, then at least to explain it to his daughter.

So he digs his fingers into his bicep and thinks a very pointed _hold on, dammit,_ at his lungs, and he speaks.

“I think… I think maybe there isn’t really any such thing as good friends and bad friends, you know? I think maybe there’s just _friends,”_ Eddie shrugs, eyes straying to the middle distance as he thinks. “People who stand by you when you’re hurt. People who help you feel not so lonely sometimes. People who are worth… being scared for, and hoping for, and living for—” _and dying for,_ a little voice pipes up at the back of his brain, _if that’s what has to be—_ “and who kind of build up their homes in here and never leave.”

He taps himself in the center of the chest, then crosses his arms tight again.

“But you know what, I think… I think you might be right. I don’t think I’ve had any… _real_ friends,” he tips his head in her direction, “not like that, not since I was a kid. I think… I mean, I don’t really remember, but I _think_ I had a lot of _real_ friends back then and… I never really managed to replicate it, after.”

Fran cocks her head to the side, frowning with her eyebrows pinched in the middle.

“Not sure why,” Eddie admits, quieter.

“Well, what happened the first time?”

Eddie takes a slow breath and scrunches his eyes shut. “I, um— I don’t—”

“Dad, your inhaler.”

He nods, a quick jerky motion as he fumbles to take it out of his jacket pocket. It only takes a few shakes before it’s ready, and the acidic crawl down his throat and into his lungs _finally_ loosens the vice on his ribs.

“Sorry, honey,” Eddie breathes, tucking the inhaler away and scrubbing a hand over his face. “I, um… Yeah, I don’t know what happened. I feel like— I feel like it was something important, but I… I can’t remember. I gotta be honest, it’s really bugging me. Like it’s right—” he pokes his temple— “right there, but I can’t reach it.”

Fran shrugs, returning to her salad. “Maybe Mike can tell you what it is.”

“You know, I actually think he will.”

“Also, not for nothing,” she says, and despite his creeping anxiety Eddie can’t hold back a small smile at her using an absurdly non-little-kid sounding phrase like _not for nothing,_ “but I didn’t mean, like… ‘I didn’t thank you had any friends’ as in, you know, like I didn’t think you had any friends at _all.”_

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. I just meant I didn’t think you had any friends other than me.”

Eddie’s smile abruptly turns soft. “You saying you’re my friend?”

“Uh… yeah?” Frannie asks, frowning and looking around the restaurant like she thinks he’s lost it for a second. “Duh? I mean, especially if it’s like you said, and friends are for, like, helping when you’re hurt and making you not so lonely and stuff. Katie and Charlotte and Annagrace and Michael and Colin do that for me all the time, but you do that, too.”

“Can I record that for posterity? You know, for when you’re a teenager and you decide you hate me?”

“Nah,” she answers right away, popping open the bag of apple chips that came with her salad. “I remain the right—”

“Retain.”

“— _retain_ the right to any teenage rebellions I wanna have. And any future Dad-hating that might be included in those teenage rebellions. If I decide I hate you when I’m a teenager then I guess you just gotta do whatever I want until I want to be your friend again.”

“Noted,” Eddie says with an agreeing bow of his head. He lets a comfortable quiet settle over them as they finish up their food, and then he adds, “And also, not for nothing, but I’m your friend, too.”

“I know,” Fran says through a mouthful of apple chip before she crumples up the bag and drops it on his empty plate, gathering up all their trash and piling it on top to make it easier on the waitress. “So what’s Mike like?”

“Oh, Mike’s the best,” Eddie tells her, because he doesn’t remember much, but he does remember that. He pins two twenties under the napkin dispenser and stands, holding Fran’s coat out so he can help her into it. “You would like him. Apparently he’s a librarian now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says as they make their way toward the exit. “And my other friend, Bev, turns out she ended up being a fashion designer.”

“So there _is_ a girl!”

“Oh, my God,” Eddie sighs, loud and dramatic, as he holds the restaurant door open. “Yes, one of my friends is a girl. No, she is _still_ not that kind of friend.”

“But she’s a fashion designer,” Fran says, skipping ahead toward the curb and stopping short of the parking lot to spin around and face him. “That’s pretty cool.”

“It is cool,” Eddie agrees, matching his pace to hers until they reach the car and beeline around to their respective sides. Once they’re both settled back in and buckled and ready to get started on the next leg of the drive, Eddie says, “It’s gonna be… nice, seeing them all again. Reminiscing, you know. Catching up.”

“Yeah?”

Eddie nods, distracted as he stares through the windshield. Jesus, there is _so much_ he’s forgotten, isn’t there? He can feel it, just behind a fuzzy film in his brain.

Why the hell has he never looked behind it before?

Fran asks, “Who else was there?”

“Well,” Eddie says, shaking his head to clear it as he starts the car back up. “There was Mike, and Bev. I think… I think Bev might have been like my sister. I actually think I remember her _telling_ people she was my sister once. I forget why, though.”

Red hair flashing in the sun. Dirt under short fingernails and smeared on freckled cheeks like warpaint. A tight hug, teary-eyed and smelling like stolen perfume.

God, it’s all still so blurry.

He pulls them back out of the parking lot and toward the signs for I-95.

“And then there was Ben, and Stanley— oh, _Stanley,_ now there’s somebody you would really like,” Eddie tells her. He turns to look at her when he stops at the red light before the highway ramp, and he finds that she doesn’t even have her phone out. She’s got her legs curled up on the seat, half-turned to face him and listening with rapt attention.

“How come?”

Eddie shrugs. The light turns green. “I… _honestly_ don’t even know why. It’s weird, I just… Somehow I know you would like him.”

“Will he be in Derry, too?”

“I hope so.”

“Well then, I think _I’ll_ be the judge of that.”

Eddie smiles, shaking his head. “I guess you will.”

“So you had… _four_ friends?”

“Six,” Eddie corrects. “There was Mike and Bev and Ben and Stan, and there was Bill and Richie, too. It was… I mean, if I remember right, it was just me and Bill and Richie and Stan at first. I think they were my first _ever_ friends when I was a kid.”

“Like Katie and Charlotte are for me.”

“Yeah, yeah, exactly,” Eddie nods. “I remember… Bill had this huge bike, I mean _huge,_ way too big for any of us, and I remember I used to ride on the back of it with my feet on the pegs.”

Creaking metal and Bill’s great big puffs of breath and the slow crest of a hill and then — _woosh!_ — flying down Canal Street so fast he felt like they could outrun anything, they could outrun the devil if they wanted to—

“That sounds dangerous,” Fran says.

“Oh, it was. Teenage boys are very stupid. Do me a favor and remember that when you’re out exercising your inalienable right to teenage rebellions, okay?”

“I make no such promises.”

“Yeah, I know you don’t,” Eddie says, reaching over and messing up her hair again. It’s already as messy as it’s ever been thanks to the impromptu road trip, having been carefully braided and then slept on and then unbraided and rebraided twice now.

She whines and swats him away all the same.

“Anyway, yeah, we did a lot of dumb things those days,” Eddie continues. He half-laughs as another memory comes back to him. “You know, whenever I was in trouble and I wasn’t allowed to leave my room, Richie would climb the tree next to our house and sneak in through my window on the second floor so your grandma wouldn’t catch him. He could’ve fallen on his way up and broken every bone in his body, but he still did it anyway. Every single time.”

“That sounds like a really dumb thing to do.”

“It was, and I’m pretty sure I told him so, but…”

Memories flash again, pinging like firecrackers in a fog.

Coke bottle glasses. His mother’s voice saying, _You shouldn’t be hanging around those boys anyway, Eddie-bear, they’re bad for you._ Hushed laughing. Knees knocking in a makeshift blanket tent. Comic books lit up under a flashlight. He’s even pretty sure Richie picked the lock on his bedroom once, breaking them out so they could sneak downstairs and raid his mom’s best snacks out of the pantry.

“I don’t know, it just always made me feel better, you know? I hated being locked in my room, and… I don’t remember much, but I do remember it always made me feel better. Having someone who would do all that just to hang out with me. I think…”

Something small and frightened and vaguely familiar curls up in his chest, something akin to that strange little something that told him to pick up Mike’s call, something he still has no name for and, he suspects, he never will.

His grip tightens on the steering wheel, and when he speaks, his voice comes out quieter than he means it to.

“I think Richie might have been my best friend.”

“Yeah?”

Eddie nods, well aware of his borderline thousand-yard stare, but at least his eyes are on the road. “Richie Tozier,” he says, and the name is familiar on his tongue in a way he hadn’t been expecting before he said it. “I don’t know how I forgot him until now. I don’t know how I forgot _any_ of them until now.”

“Well, maybe you’ll remember more when you see everybody,” Fran offers.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

He almost says _hopefully,_ but somehow he knows that even the _maybe_ was redundant.

Sure as anything, Eddie is going to remember more when he sees them all. He’s going to keep remembering more and more as the distance between him and Derry steadily shrinks at seventy-five miles an hour, and he knows it won’t stop there.

And of course there’s that quivering, frightened thing in his chest telling him that maybe he shouldn’t be hoping for that after all. Maybe he should let those memories stay exactly where they are, safe behind a thick hazy film in his head.

Maybe he should turn the car around right now and never look back.

“You said Richie _Tozier?”_

Eddie blinks out of his reverie. “Uh, yeah, why?”

“I feel like I’ve heard of him,” she says, typing distractedly on her phone. There’s a few seconds in which she only hums to herself, clicking away, and then, “Oh! That’s why. The guy who voiced one of the penguins in that one zoo movie was named Richie Tozier. I probably saw his name in the credits.”

“Seriously?”

“Uh-huh. Do you think that’s him?”

“I… I mean, it must be, right?” Eddie asks. After all, how many Richie Toziers can there really be? That can’t be a common name, can it?

“Does he have really big glasses and, like, _super_ messy black hair?”

“Uh, yeah,” Eddie blinks. “Yeah, he did.”

“That’s him, then,” Fran says with a sort of self-assured finality. She leans forward and holds the phone up over the dash so that he can look at it while keeping the road in his peripheral, and— shit, yeah, that is absolutely Richie Tozier looking up at him from the photo of an IMDb page, carefully casual with his lopsided smile and his hair all over the place and his eye-magnifying coke bottle glasses.

Richie Tozier plus twenty-something years. Holy shit.

“Dad!”

Eddie looks up at the exact instant that the car’s tires start rolling over the rumble strips on the side of the road, and he swerves them back into the lane with his heart in his throat and his arm thrown out to pin Fran to her seat.

“Jeez,” she says. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Eddie tells her, suddenly out of breath. “It’s just— weird. All these memories coming back, you know?”

“Mm,” Fran agrees, having already put it from her mind and returned to scrolling on her phone. “He wasn’t in a whole lot of other stuff, but he was on Saturday Night Live a bunch. And it looks like he does a lot of stand-up.”

“That… actually makes a lot of sense.”

They fall into silence for a bit, as Fran plays around on her phone and Eddie tries to slow down the onslaught of memory continually pounding into his frontal lobe. It’s giving him a goddamn headache at this rate.

But it _does_ make a lot of sense. Richie becoming a guy who tells jokes for a living, Richie with all those terrible voices, the Voices-with-a-capital-V, Richie cracking the stupidest jokes on Earth and then turning toward Eddie with a wide smile on his face like, _Well? Did ya hear that one? What’s blocking up your ears, Eds, come on, that was funny!_

Again his reverie is interrupted, but this time it’s not by Fran.

This time it’s by her phone.

She leans forward and turns the radio down to almost nothing so they can hear the video on her phone better, just as a voice announces, _“Ladies and gentlemen, RRRRRichie Tozier!”_

There’s an uproar of applause and cheers, and then:

_“Hey, thanks! Thanks, good to be here.”_

A tension Eddie hadn’t known had even been there in the first place abruptly vanishes, his shoulders dropping. That’s Richie. Holy shit, that’s really—

_“So, uh, my girlfriend caught me masturbating to her sister’s Facebook page—”_

“Oh, my God!” Eddie shouts loud enough to drown it out. Fucking of course Richie’s stand-up would open with something like that. “Turn that off!”

“What? Why?”

“It’s not for kids, Jesus Christ, what’s it rated?”

Fran pauses it, double checks, and says, “You said I could watch what I want as long as it’s not PG-13 or R.”

“What is this rated, Francine?”

“TV-MA?”

“That’s the TV version of R! Close it right now.”

“Ugh. Fine,” Fran acquiesces with a roll of her eyes, closing the window. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her open up what looks like a texting chain instead, and he releases the breath he’d been holding as she turns her attention to something that’s _not_ his old childhood friend making R-rated sex jokes on live fucking TV.

Jesus Christ, Richie’s gonna get an earful if he’s in Maine, too.

“So,” Fran starts.

“… So?” Eddie asks, as he sends a quick prayer up to literally anyone that’s listening. _Please for the love of God do not let her ask me what masturbating means, I do not have the mental capacity to deal with that right now._

Luckily someone seems to be on his side, because instead she says, “So your friend Mike ended up being a librarian, and your totally-not-a-girlfriend friend-who’s-a-girl is a cool fashion designer, and this guy is an actor on SNL.”

“Apparently, yeah.”

“So why didn’t _you_ end up with a cool job?”

Eddie lets his jaw drop. “Excuse you! My job is _so_ cool.”

Fran snorts, eyes widening. “Uh-huh. Sure.”

“It earns me enough money that I can afford to feed that smart mouth,” Eddie says, reaching over and poking her cheek. “I’d say that’s pretty cool.”

“Just ‘cause it makes you a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s cool,” Fran tells him with the air of someone giving out life-changing truths of the universe. “Our principal makes a lot of money and _he’s_ not cool.”

“Well, I’m—”

Frannie gasps then, so loudly that it nearly gives Eddie a heart attack and sends them back over the rumble strips.

“What?! What happened? What—?”

“That sign said MOOSE crossing!” Frannie yells at nearly the top of her lungs, and Eddie sags back into his seat with a sigh. “Are there really moose in Maine? Are we gonna _see_ a moose? I thought they only had moose in Canada!”

“Maine is right next to Canada.”

“I know _that,”_ Fran says. “Did you ever see a moose when you lived here?”

“If I did see one, I don’t remember,” Eddie says, even as that thought dredges up another one, something about… piranhas? What? Why the hell is he thinking of piranhas in _Maine,_ for shit’s sake? He shakes his head. “But if that sign said moose crossing, there must be some around here somewhere. Maybe we will see one.”

And just like that, Frannie abandons every single effort to look up his old childhood friends, every single effort to argue the difference between R and TV-MA, every single thought about his apparently super uncool job and her super uncool principal, and instead she presses her cheek to the window and keeps her wide eyes glued to the trees whizzing by.

“If I see one, you _have_ to stop.”

“Will do.”

“I mean it. I gotta take a picture of it. Charlotte and Katie are gonna _flip.”_

“Okay.”

“Seriously. I’ll keep watch, but you gotta stop when I say so.”

“Got it.”

“You better. We’re gonna see a _moose,_ Dad.”

They do not see a moose.

Whether that’s because they truly did not drive within view of one, or because their self-proclaimed Moose Watcher fell asleep with her cheek on the window and her mouth hanging open within twenty minutes of her watch, well, that’s probably gonna remain a mystery for the ages.

Eddie pulls into a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot about forty minutes after they pass through Bangor, and Fran shifts in her sleep, curling up and tucking her head down against the ledge at the bottom of the window. He gets out, shuts the door as quietly as possible, locks the doors, and goes inside to get himself a coffee and a chance to stretch his legs.

Half an hour until Derry.

Half an hour. Thirty minutes. Jesus.

When he gets back into the car, Fran’s still asleep, and Eddie’s feeling more and more anxious about this upcoming reunion for reasons he _still_ can’t quite place. So instead of immediately getting back on the road, he pulls out his own cell phone, swipes away all his notifications for missed calls and text messages, and opens up YouTube.

He’s typing Richie’s name before he’s even made the conscious decision to.

With a glance at Fran to make sure she’s still dead to the world, Eddie double checks that his volume’s nearly as low as it can go, and then he clicks on the first result.

And Richie’s stand-up is…

Okay, it’s kind of awful.

Eddie gives the smallest of laughs once or twice, but mostly he just sits there with confusion nesting itself on his face, his eyes stuck on Richie. It’s just— it doesn’t feel like _him._ That’s a ridiculous thought for Eddie to have, as someone who hasn’t actually known Richie since he was too young to see an R-rated movie by himself, but the thought is there all the same. This is Richie, it’s definitely the same Richie who climbed in his bedroom window as a kid, all gangly too-long limbs and flailing gestures and wild hair and too-big eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses. He’s taller, _broader,_ dressed in a sportcoat that feels even more out-of-place on him than the weird off-color jokes, but it’s definitely Richie Tozier.

Plus or minus twenty-something years.

Eddie sighs, closing the video after about ten minutes.

Of course it doesn’t feel like the Richie he knew, it’s been fucking _decades._ It’s not like Eddie hasn’t changed since leaving Derry; he has an entire _child,_ for Christ’s sake. Why should Richie still be anything like the Richie he knew?

Why should _any_ of them be anything like they were when they were kids?

It’s a saddening sort of thought, and the anxiety is still so bone fucking deep, but the knowledge that he’s not the only one going into this with a twenty-something year gap is… oddly comforting, somehow. Like they’ll all be on even ground, maybe.

Like he’s not alone.

Eddie takes a fortifying breath.

He’s _not_ alone, of course. Hasn’t been for a long while. But somehow this feels— different. Like maybe he was alone in a different sense before, and that’s finally been lifted.

Eddie still has his phone in his hand.

Frannie is still fast asleep in the passenger seat.

He still has a plethora of missed calls and texts from his wife.

Before he can talk himself out of it, he opens up his messages. There are thirty-seven missed texts, all from Myra, all saying some variation of the same thing that boils down to _come home right this instant._ Eddie lets his thumb hover over the call button for about three seconds before he realizes that he’s already tried talking to her face-to-face and he’s already tried talking to her over the phone and neither of those things worked.

So he takes another breath, and he starts typing.

It takes him six— no, _seven_ tries before he manages to write something that sounds even halfway decent, something that actually gets across what he’s trying to say, and it still doesn’t quite feel like enough.

_I meant what I said before I left. This, you and me, it hasn’t been working for a long time. It’s not fair to either of us to keep it going. It’s not fair to Frannie. I know you know that. I had to go home to help a friend, and I’m not sorry I had to go, but I am sorry this is all happening at once. I’m sorry Frannie ended up coming with me. It wasn’t my intention to spring this on you and take her away from home, too._

He flips back and forth on that last bit, wondering if he really _is_ sorry that Frannie ended up coming along with him after all, and whether or not it’s a blatant lie to say he is. Because, to say nothing of the fact that _he_ feels more at ease with Frannie right here with him, is it not better to have her here than at home right now? He’s essentially just dropped a nuke on his and Myra’s relationship; is it not better that he doesn’t have to worry about what she might say around Frannie when she’s this upset?

That is, without doubt, a terrible idea for him to even entertain. That’s his kid’s _mother,_ for God’s sake.

He shakes his head, keeps the message as is, and adds:

_I’ll be back by the end of the weekend. We’ll talk more about it then, but my mind is made up. I know if you take some time to really think about it, you’ll get there, too._

By the time he’s finished writing and rewriting and deleting and rewriting again and editing and rereading the message, making it as straightforward and impossible to misconstrue as he possibly can—

He finds, bizarrely, that he’s crying.

It’s not a dramatic sort of cry. Instead it’s like a pressure has built up in his throat and behind his eyes and eventually the floodgates just kind of cracked open, like the sad mournful ache in his chest needed somewhere else to go so that something else could eventually seep in and take its place. He sniffs, scrubs his eyes dry, and gently wriggles the wedding ring off his finger and sets it safely in the center console. He clicks send before he can come to his senses.

Then he turns his phone entirely off and puts the car in drive.

Okay. He’s got this.

Thirty minutes to Derry.

To say that Michael Hanlon is nervous would be such an understatement that it’s not worth stating in the first place.

It’s been twenty-four years since he last saw Bill and Richie. Twenty-five since Eddie, twenty-six since Stan and Ben, twenty-seven since Beverly. He has not seen a single one of them in over two decades and he misses them all so intensely that he _aches_ with it, and now he’s about to see every single one of them, all together for the first time since they stood in that circle in the grassy hills outside the Barrens.

All the Losers, reunited.

He wishes to God it was for any other reason than this, but then again, would they have all come back for anything less?

For that matter, would they have all come back for _this,_ had they really known what it was? Would they have come back, or would they have blocked his number and thrown their phones away and never looked back?

Would _he_ have, if he were in any of their places?

And Mike knows, he knows that all of this, what he’s doing, what he’s done — letting them all split off and live their lives, leaving them free to forget everything, staying behind and waiting to call them back for the worst news they’ll ever receive in their lives, a call to action they should never have been saddled with in the first place — he knows it’s all for the best. He knows the only alternative is something unthinkable. He knows it’s what’s right.

But sometimes…

Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

A lot of that anxiety clings like sticky resin to his ribs even as he stands waiting in the Jade of Orient private room, but a lot of it also _instantly_ flees his mind the moment Bill Denbrough steps inside.

It’s like a punch to the chest, seeing him again. In _person._

“Hey,” Mike says, already closing the distance between them before he can second guess it, already pulling Bill into a hug.

 _“Woah,_ Mikey,” Bill says, half stunned by the sound of his voice. He brings one hand up to pat Mike’s back. “You look good, hey, how… how you doing?”

Mike can’t help it; he laughs, rocking Bill for a second before he pulls back and pats him on the shoulder. “I didn’t know if everyone was gonna come, you know, after all this time? But you,” Mike says, gently patting him again, smiling so wide his cheeks hurt. “Of course you came. I knew you’d come.”

“Yeah, an oath is an oath,” Bill says, like it’s that simple, because of course it is.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “Of course.”

“Losers…” Bill trails off, brow furrowing like he can’t quite figure out why he’s saying what he’s saying, staring into the middle distance before he looks uncertainly up at Mike. “Losers gotta stick together, right?”

“Losers,” Mike breathes, nodding. “You remember that. That’s good. What else do you remember?”

Bill opens his mouth, and then—

“Well,” comes a voice from the doorway. “I already regret coming.”

Mike turns to find Stanley Uris, standing in the doorway with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, looking every bit the grown up accountant that little teenage Stanley always did. For a solid three seconds of Bill’s and Mike’s stunned silence, Stan watches the two of them with a completely deadpan face, one unimpressed eyebrow up.

Then he breaks into a small smile. “Hey, guys.”

“Stan,” Mike says, knowing it comes out sounding entirely too heartfelt for how little they must remember of him, but Stanley doesn’t seem to mind. He even meets Mike halfway across the room and returns his hug with a vengeance, wrapping his arms tight around his waist and tucking his face down into Mike’s shoulder like they’re kids again and they’re terrified and trembling at the prospect of stepping back into Neibolt, not a pair of grown men nearly thirty years after the fact in a Chinese restaurant. Mike gulps, gives Stan a gentle squeeze, and says, “It’s really good to see you.”

“You, too,” Stan says, pulling back and eyeing Mike up and down. Whatever tension he’d been holding seems to maybe not have left him, but it’s somehow been set aside, because Mike can’t quite see it anymore. “You got _huge,_ Mike. Jesus, look at you.”

“Now, _why is it—”_

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Stan sighs, closing his eyes as Richie strides into the room with all the subtlety of a foghorn, like he was standing out there waiting for his cue.

“— that a Jew’s favorite curse is always the J-man’s name, huh, Staniel?”

Stan doesn’t answer that, instead completely ignoring Richie and turning to give Bill a hug, too. “Okay, now I _definitely_ regret coming.”

“Oh, come on, I’m half Jewish, that grants me at least, like… _half_ a free pass to be a little playfully anti-semitic,” Richie says, hands tucked in his pockets. “And by the way, if you think Mikey here got huge—” he waggles his eyebrows and gives Mike an exaggeratedly appreciative once-over— “then just you fuckin’ _wait_ until you see Haystack. He’s out in the parking lot now, probably still too busy talking to _Mizz Marsh_ about how hot they both got to bother dealing with any of us ugly C-listers. And by ugly C-listers I just mean me and Bill. Obviously.”

“Richie,” Bill says, shaking his head. “Y-you haven’t changed.”

“If it ain’t broke,” Richie shrugs, and then his show-offy smile takes a turn for the genuine. “It’s good to see you guys. Seriously.”

More hugs are exchanged — Stan, in spite of his initial protests, being the first to hug Richie with a roll of his eyes and a smile that they all pretend not to see — and it’s not long before Ben and Bev come in, bringing their numbers up to six and bringing yet another round of hugs and _how are you’s_ and _it’s been so long’s._

And then, when Mike has very nearly been able to put his anxieties out of his mind, one last voice is heard from outside the room.

“… and anything with eggs, uh— gluten, definitely no gluten for either of us, and she can’t do peanuts, and if I eat anything with a cashew in it, I could… realistically… die,” Eddie says to a waitress who’s good naturedly listening to his entire spiel as he steps into the room, but his voice trails off to nothing as he catches sight of everyone standing around the table. His eyes widen. “Oh. Holy _shit.”_

The waitress seems to take that as a good signal to make her escape, and at that moment, a tiny little girl comes walking up beside Eddie.

And every _single_ thought in Mike’s head comes to a screeching halt.

It’s just white noise. A high-pitched whistle, a _thump-thump-thump_ in his throat.

It’s fear, really.

That’s exactly what it is, as old and as familiar as anything he’s ever felt, even if he won’t recognize it for a few seconds.

The girl’s hardly as tall as Eddie’s chest, a skinny little thing in a purple sweater and jeans with sequins on the pockets. Between the big brown eyes and the freckles dotting her cheeks and the wide-eyed scandalized look on her face, it is impossible not to immediately put together who she is.

“Yeah, holy—”

“Do _not,”_ Eddie snaps, throwing a hand up. “You _know_ you’re not supposed to say that, I just—”

“What? Let the kid speak!” Richie yells, earning him an immediate glare from Eddie that feels like it’s pulled straight from fifteen-year-old Eddie’s face. “What are you, a cop?”

“Yeah, hello to you, too, Richie,” Eddie rolls his eyes, dragging a hand down his face. Then he drops that hand on top of the little girl’s head and says, “Everybody, this is Francine. Sorry for the, uh— the unexpected plus one. She kind of stowed away in my car.”

At that, Francine gives them all a toothy grin, puffing herself up with pride. “Yes, I did.”

Eddie tries, and fails, not to smile at that, though the smile is clearly a tired one, strained at the edges. “Is there room for an extra seat?”

“We’ll make room,” Ben says without hesitation. He and Bill have already begun shifting chairs around.

“Yeah, let’s get _cozy,”_ Richie shouts, shimmying as far into Stan’s personal space as he possibly can. “You heard the man, pretend you like each other. Get to snuggling! _Vamanos!”_

Beverly smiles, rolling her eyes and ignoring the rest of them as she walks over to Eddie and pulls him into a tight hug. “It’s so good to see you, Eds,” she says, and when she pulls away she looks down at Francine and holds a hand out for her to shake. “And Francine, it is very nice to meet you. I’m Bev.”

“I know,” Francine says, taking her hand and giving it a firm business-like shake. “And nobody actually calls me _Francine._ That makes me sound like an old lady. It’s Fran.”

From across the table Richie, evidently now determined to devote all of his attention to this little girl and this little girl only, cups his hands around his mouth and shouts, “And just how old _are_ you, Miss Fran?”

“Nine and a half,” she answers, to which Richie gives an impressed low whistle.

 _… Oh,_ Mike finally thinks, when the white noise panic in his brain has receded just enough to allow even the most basic of thoughts, and Eddie sits down beside Bev with his _nine-year-old daughter_ seated between him and Richie.

Eddie’s daughter.

Eddie’s _child,_ his nine-year-old child, with him — with all of them — in Derry.

_Oh, shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stanley’s whole pleasant life being at the eye of a storm and eddie’s good friends or bad friends speech both come directly from the book. yeah, i’ll admit stephen king wrote some banger lines every so often (i say, begrudgingly, in the midst of writing 100k+ words of fic based on characters and a plot premise that he literally brought into existence in the first place)
> 
> also here's my [multi-fandom tumblr](https://iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid.tumblr.com/) and my [primarily clown movie twitter](https://twitter.com/slsustek) if you ever wanna come yell with me about these idiots


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings for this chapter:** same warnings i would give for the chinese restaurant scene in the movie, gross stuff, blood, etc., plus lots of cursing in front of a minor, a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to stan’s near-death, and just general peril and scary life-threatening situations
> 
> a quick note: this is a found family story, it's a story about confronting your demons and overcoming a traumatic past, it's a story about how _goddamn much_ i love eddie kaspbrak and it is of course a slow burn gay romance -- but **it is also a horror story,** and as such, i strongly encourage comments here or private messages on [tumblr](https://iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid.tumblr.com) to tell me any triggers i might have forgotten to tag, or potential things i should warn for in the future
> 
> enjoy!

Something’s up.

Eddie’s not sure _what_ it is that’s up, but something’s up.

Even with all the excitement of seeing everybody again — and isn’t _that_ just fucking wild, that the second he stepped into this room it was like he slotted right back into place amongst these guys, these Losers, like none of them ever left in the first place — even with all that, he can still tell that something’s up.

Stanley’s been mostly quiet for the majority of dinner, except for a brief five minutes in which he answered Bev’s question about whether any of the rest of them have kids. (Five-year-old Ava, eight-year-old Olive, and twelve-year-old Andy, all filling up an album on his phone that consists of exactly 2,734 pictures.) And that, Stanley being quiet, Stanley being content to recede into the background until a subject he’s excited to talk about is brought up, that’s not exactly out of the ordinary from what Eddie remembers. Neither is Mike being a man of few words, either, or Ben, especially given that the conversation has been essentially dominated by—

“So wait, hang on, Eddie, you got _married?”_ Richie asks, grinning like an idiot, and Eddie abruptly forgets everything else he was thinking about.

“Uh, yeah, why’s that so funny, huh?”

“Like, to a woman.”

“No,” Eddie says, as convincingly casual as he can possibly be, and he does not miss the way Richie’s eyebrows tick up. “Actually, Francine was born by immaculate conception.”

Richie sputters for a second, then plasters on one of his widest hey-look-at-me grins and shouts, _“Ay!_ Eddie Spaghetti gets off a good one!”

“Alright, how about you, Trashmouth?” Bill speaks up. “You married?”

“There is no _way_ Richie’s married!” Bev laughs, her cheeks flushed from the second round of drinks that’s already come and gone. Eddie’s been trying to take it easy on the drinks and even he’s starting to feel it.

“What? No, I got married,” Richie says.

Bev shakes her head. “Richie, I don’t believe it.”

“You got married?” Eddie can’t help asking. “You?”

“Yeah,” Richie nods. “You didn’t know I got married?”

“How in the hell would I have—?”

“Yeah, dude, me and your mom are very happy together—”

Bill chokes on his drink, Ben shakes his head with a smile, and Bev takes on a whole new shade of red as she drops her face into her hands and laughs harder than ever. Stan doesn’t bat an eye, muttering, _“How_ did you not see that coming, man?”

Eddie fixes Richie with a glare and mouths the most emphatic _fuck you_ he can manage without actually saying it aloud, and between them, Frannie peers up at Richie and says, “That doesn’t even make any _sense.”_

“Mm,” Richie hums, eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t it?”

“No, because my dad’s mom died, like, _forever_ ago, and even if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have even liked you, let alone _married_ you.”

From Richie’s other side Stan laughs out loud at that, and from across the table Bill yells, “She got you there, Trashmouth!”

“Well, I guess the joke’s on me, Miss Fran,” Richie says, all exaggerated sweetness, one arm slung over the back of his seat so he’s half turned toward her and showing off the big broad shoulders he must have grown into after they all left Derry. “Your dad’s mom _did_ know me, and I gotta say, if I remember, you are _absolutely_ right. Pretty sure she hated my guts.”

“That’s probably because you’re so loud and your hair’s so messy,” Fran says without missing a beat.

Richie grins ear-to-ear. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, she tried to make me fix my hair, like, every time we went over her house, and my hair didn’t even look _that_ bad. Do you not own a hairbrush?”

Stan grins, elbow on the table and cheek in hand. “Oh, I’m gonna pay this kid to follow you around everywhere you go, Rich.”

“I do _not_ own a hairbrush, no,” Richie tells Fran, totally unfazed. If anything he just looks completely and utterly charmed by her relentless roasting. “Why, are you offering one?”

“Ew, no. You can’t use somebody _else’s_ hairbrush. That’s how you get lice.”

“My God,” Richie says, unwinding his arm from behind the chair so he can hold his hands up with each thumb touching the opposite forefinger, like he’s setting up a frame for a movie. “It’s like a carbon copy. Eddie Spaghetti 2.0.”

“That is how genetics works,” Eddie deadpans as the waitress brings a third round of drinks.

“Why do you keep calling him that?” Fran asks.

“Yeah, Rich, why _do_ you keep calling me that?”

“Our last name isn’t Spaghetti, it’s Kaspbrak.”

“It’s a _nickname,_ Frannie my dear,” Richie tells her, taking a drink from the waitress’s tray and knocking half of it back like a shot. He points at Eddie with the hand still holding his glass and adds, “And your padre loves it when I call him that.”

“I absolutely do not.”

“It’s a weird nickname,” Frannie says. “What, you just call him that because it rhymes? That’d be like if everybody called you, like… Richie Itchy or something.”

“I would actually be so flattered if you called me Richie Itchy. So flattered. For the lice, you know,” Richie adds, leaning toward her and reaching up with both hands to fluff up his hair. She leans back, wrinkling her nose, but Eddie can see her faintly smiling at his antics— again, like father, like daughter, apparently.

_“Gross.”_

“Welcome to the club, kiddo, everybody here thinks I’m gross.”

Stanley speaks up, “That’s just an objective fact, Rich.”

Frannie giggles at that, and Stanley reaches across Richie to give her a low-five that she eagerly returns.

“Fran and Stan the Man!” Richie laments, leaning back with a hand on his chest. “The dynamic duo of my worst nightmares. _Ooh,_ by the way, can I call you Frannie Whammy?”

“That’s even dumber.”

“You got me,” Richie admits, and he leans back so the front two legs of his chair lift off the ground, squinting in thought. “Hm. Franny Granny?”

“Not your best work, Richie,” Ben tells him.

“No, it’s not,” Richie agrees with a slow nod. To Fran, he says, “I’ll keep workshopping and get back to you on that.” And then, pointing with his glass at Ben, “And _you!_ You know what, thank you for finally speaking up, Haystack, because that brings me to my next point: Can we talk about the elephant _not_ in the room? Ben!”

Richie flails with both hands in a gesture that Eddie thinks is meant to mean, _what the fuck, dude,_ without having to actually say it out loud, and Ben flushes pink.

“Okay, okay, obviously I… lost a few pounds—”

“A _few pounds?”_ Richie echoes, eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “Ben, come on, you’re— you’re hot!”

“Stop it,” Bev scolds lowly, though she’s smiling, too. “You’re embarrassing him.”

“For real, you’re like every Brazilian soccer player rolled into one,” Richie continues like he hasn’t been interrupted at all. “I mean, how? Where the—” he cuts himself off, glances at Fran, and course corrects— “eff did it all go, man?”

As Ben sighs and apparently decides to humor Richie, setting off on what seems like a very reluctant walk down memory lane to tell him about some asshole track coach from his high school, Mike discreetly gets up from his seat and begins a wide circle around the table toward the door.

At first, Eddie just assumes he’s going to the bathroom, but then for some reason he stops right by Eddie’s chair.

“Hey,” he says, tentative and soft in a way _should_ make it difficult to hear over Ben’s story and Richie’s incessant heckling, but somehow it just makes it all the more clear. He gestures with a tilt of his head toward the door out of the private room. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Uh… sure,” Eddie says, blinking in surprise. He looks down at Fran and asks, “You okay here while I go talk to Mike for a second, honey?”

She gives an emphatic nod, and when Eddie gets up, he immediately realizes why; the very second his chair is vacant, Fran sidles over into it so she’s sitting next to Bev instead of Richie. Pulling Bev right out of a hushed conversation she’d been having with Bill, Fran asks, “Are you really a fashion designer? That’s what my dad said, he said you’re a fashion designer.”

Bev smiles down at her, bright and happy and a little pink-cheeked from the alcohol. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

The rest of their conversation is lost to the cacophony of everyone else’s voices as Eddie and Mike head out of the room.

“Get ready,” Eddie tells him as they pass under the threshold. “She’s gonna be interrogating you about the library next, she’s a little obsessed with books.”

Mike, as it turns out, is too distracted to answer; he nearly smacks straight into their waitress on her way into the room, and he jumps back, a hand on his chest.

“Sorry, so sorry,” Mike breathes, as if all four-foot-ten of her somehow scared _him,_ but she rights her tray of fortune cookies with a smile that says not to worry about it, and the next moment she’s disappeared into the room.

Mike shakes his head in a way that Eddie can only interpret as shaking his head at himself, and then he’s beckoning Eddie along, taking them quickly into the relative privacy of a hallway leading to the bathrooms before he stops. Only then does he turn to face Eddie, leaning back against a wall of deep maroon wallpaper flecked with yellow and gold, a litany of Chinese themed paper decorations dangling and swaying above his head.

“Mike,” Eddie says, frowning, his hands on his hips. “What’s this about? Are you okay? You look…”

He trails off, because he can’t exactly say Mike looks _bad._ Mike looks high-strung and nervous and kind of like he could use a week-long nap, but he somehow looks the opposite of _bad._ It’s true that Richie had zeroed in on Ben, but that was just the sheer difference between the Ben of then and the Ben of now, whereas Mike…

Mike had always had that potential in him, Eddie thinks. The potential to be big and strong in a quiet, unassuming kind of way. He had always had that calm easy strength to him, born from years of working on his parents’ farm by the time he was thirteen.

And now he’s, what, six-foot-three? Six-foot-four?

“Holy shit,” Eddie says, another memory crystallizing with no warning at all. He feels his eyes widen of their own accord, feels a smile tugging at his face. “Did you…? Mike, did you pick me up and put me in a bike basket? Am I remembering that right?”

Mike blinks, then huffs a surprised laugh. A tiny fraction of the tension in his shoulders loosens.

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“Because I… broke my arm, holy shit, that’s _right!”_ Eddie says. He flexes his hand; his right forearm has started tingling at the mere thought of it, the way it does every time it’s gonna rain, and he can’t help it. He laughs. “I broke my arm, and you picked me up and put me in your bike basket so you guys could get me home.”

Mike smiles, but if Eddie’s not mistaken there seems to be an almost sad edge to it, a shine to his eyes.

“How much else do you remember, Eddie?”

“I… I don’t know. Not much. But it’s all…” Eddie points at his own head, twirls his finger in a circle. “It’s all coming back a lot faster now that I’m here, you know? With you guys.”

“Eddie, listen,” Mike says, and in that moment somehow he manages to look small, which is ridiculous since he’s so goddamn big that Eddie has to crane his neck to make eye contact with him. “I’m really happy you came. I need you to know that I’m really, just— _so_ happy to see you it’s insane, man. I missed you, all of you, so much.”

“Thanks, Mike. I… missed you, too, actually. It’s crazy to think about, right? I didn’t even remember who you guys were until today, but—”

“Eddie, you need to get out of Derry.”

Eddie blinks, and for a moment he’s so taken aback that he thinks he must have heard wrong.

But Mike doesn’t backtrack, and, no, that is definitely what he said.

“I— _what?_ Mike, you… You’re the one that called us all here.”

“I know. And I’m sorry, but you need to get out of Derry.”

“But you— I mean, you called us all here and we _just_ got here and you’re already—?”

“I don’t mean everyone,” Mike tells him, like each word physically pains him to say. His eyes are still shining. “Eddie, I just mean you. _You_ need to get out of Derry.”

“What? _Why?”_

“I’ve been trying to come up with some better way to tell you,” Mike says, shaking his head. “I didn’t want to scare you, and I thought about just— pretending I don’t _want_ you here, hurting your feelings, but I’m just not that good of an actor, and honestly, I don’t think that not scaring you is even an option anymore. I don’t think it’s _been_ an option since you crossed the Derry town line. Maybe earlier. So I thought… I don’t know, I thought maybe getting you alone might be the next best thing.”

“Mike,” Eddie says, dread coiling in his stomach. The fear from earlier is a slow tide creeping its way back in, ebbing and flowing. “What are you saying? Why do I have to get out of Derry and no one else does?”

“Eddie, I think you might know why.”

And the horrible thing about it is that Eddie sort of thinks he does— might. Maybe.

He says anyway, “No, I…”

“You do. Somewhere in there, you know. Something happens to you when you leave this town, the further away you go, the hazier it gets, but— Eddie, you remember. Somewhere in there, you remember.”

“No,” Eddie repeats, shaking his head. His mouth and throat are dry as a desert, his heart skipping. “No, I don’t.”

“When I called you,” Mike goes on, desperation in every thrum of his voice, “when you picked up the phone, what do you remember from that moment? What do you remember _feeling?”_

“I— I don’t know, I just—” Eddie stammers, fumbling for his inhaler in his jacket pocket. He grips it tight like a lifeline and says, “I… crashed my car? I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking, alright? My blood pressure was through the roof and I couldn’t _think_ straight through all the… the…”

“The fear,” Mike finishes for him. “That’s what it was. Fear. What you felt then, and what you’re feeling right now… Eddie, it’s fear.”

Fuck.

Fucking _shit,_ why is he so scared? Why can’t he—?

Eddie pulls out the inhaler, gives it a few rough shakes, and pumps bitter acid down his throat that only kicks his breathing back into step and does just about jack shit for everything else. His heart’s still pounding, his brain is still a screaming clouded mess of white noise, and—

And behind Mike, on the maroon wallpaper stretched from the tacky red carpet up to the hanging paper decorations, the flecks of yellow and gold start to move.

Eddie stands, paralyzed, watching, his heart racing through his temples with its _thump thump thump thumpthumthu—_ as the yellow and gold specks somehow swirl around like they’re caught in a whirlpool and not _static_ _flecks of paint on fucking wallpaper,_ swirling and gathering together and coalescing into—

Into two painted yellow eyes, staring straight at him from a blood red canvas.

“Fuck,” Eddie spits. He falls back against the opposite wall. “Fuck, the _fucking clown—”_

At that moment, a scream erupts from across the restaurant.

A high-pitched terrified scream that Eddie recognizes in an instant.

Mike goes several shades too pale right as Eddie feels his heart plummet into his stomach. “Oh, God—”

 _“Frannie,”_ Eddie says without even meaning to, his voice foreign to his own ears, and he’s already diving out of the hall and hauling toward their private room, weaving around a woman carrying a tray of dirty dishes and nearly sending the entire thing flying into the air, but it doesn’t _fucking matter,_ and distantly, through a haze of pure adrenaline and terror, Eddie thinks he’s never run this fast in his life — _not in twenty-seven years_ — but it’s still not fucking fast enough, he needs to be there _now,_ he needs to—

He barrels through the open doorway into the private room, Mike hot on his heels, both of them heaving and out of breath and staring around with wide eyes at…

The exact same scene they just left.

“Dad?” Frannie asks, frowning at him from where she’s returned to her seat beside Richie. Her hair is neatly pulled up into a complicated circlet of braids that Bev must have done for her, and she’s munching on half a fortune cookie with the other half of it sitting in her hand, and she’s _okay._

Not screaming. Not hurt. Not—

“Uh, Eds?” Richie asks. “Mike? Yoo-hoo?”

“Dad. Hello?”

“That’s what it does,” Eddie finds himself murmuring. “Fucks with us. With our heads. _Fuck.”_

He says it too quietly for any of them to hear, or at least, too quietly for any of them to hear except for Mike, who grounds him with a steady hand on his upper arm. Mike, firm and unyielding and so quietly strong, Mike who stayed here in fucking Derry for decades and who remembered and who brought them all _back_ here.

“That’s what _It_ does,” Mike gently corrects.

“Mike, what the hell did you do, man?” Eddie says, horrified. “I should still be in New York, I shouldn’t— _she_ shouldn’t—”

“I know,” Mike says, and now everyone’s looking at the two of them like they’ve lost their minds. Maybe they have. “I know, I’m sorry. Eddie, I swear if I’d known—”

“Dad,” Fran interrupts. “What’s going on?”

“I— nothing, honey,” Eddie says, and immediately feels terrible for so blatantly lying to her. “I just— um, we have to go.”

“Huh? But why?”

Eddie makes his way to the seat he’d been sitting in, patting down his pockets to make sure he has everything— and goddammit, he’s shaking like a fucking leaf, but everything is there. Keys, wallet, phone, inhaler, all there.

“How many times do I have to say ‘no buts,’ huh? Come on, we’re going.”

_“Now?”_

“Yes, now,” Eddie says, waving her along and trying not to pay attention to the looks he’s getting from the others. He doesn’t succeed in that at all; Bev’s watching him with a look of dawning recognition — _fuck, don’t let her remember, not yet, not now_ — and Ben’s frowning with a crease between his brows and Stan’s sitting back with a muttered curse under his breath and Bill just looks concerned and Richie’s looking at him with—

Betrayal, that’s what that look is.

It’s a vague sort of betrayal, not terrified ( _not yet,_ Eddie thinks) but only confused. It’s a look that says, _hey, what gives, we just started catching up and you’re already ditching us?_

Eddie tries very, very hard not to think about the fact that he deserves that look now for something far worse. He tries very, very hard to squash down the surge of guilt at the knowledge that he’s _leaving_ them, he’s leaving his best friends in the world to deal with something so unimaginably horrible that he can’t even think about it without the beginnings of panic starting to cling to his heart like black fucking tar—

Fran’s started to get up, having clearly recognized the tone in her father’s voice and the fact that he won’t be talked down from this.

But then she pauses, hesitating.

“Dad,” she says, tilting her head and peering down at the tiny slip of paper in her hand. “Why’s my fortune cookie just say ‘Welcome’?”

The table lurches with a _BANG,_ and every single one of them jumps.

“Fran, honey,” Eddie says, shocked at the steadiness of his own voice, “get away from the table, now.”

“Oh, God,” Bev breathes, both hands over her mouth.

“What…?” Richie starts to ask, and then jumps up out of his chair when the bowl of fortune cookies at the center of the table starts shaking, rattling around like it’s caught in an earthquake. “Oh, what the _fuck_ is that, man?”

“Daddy?” Fran asks, hurrying away from the table until she’s backed up against him. “Daddy, what’s going on?”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says. “It’s okay, we just have to—”

There’s another _BANG_ from the table. The fortune cookies rattle and leap up into the air like fucking popcorn kernels, and they start swelling from their neatly folded shapes into great big round balls of fried dough, swelling and growing until—

_POP!_

“Sh- sh- _shit,”_ Bill cries, stumbling out of his seat.

The rest of them are already out of their seats, watching as the fortune cookies grow and grow and grow and then burst, one by one like a bunch of fucked up balloons, sending their tiny scraps of paper flying into the air like confetti. Some of them start leaping from the bowl and landing on the edges of the table amongst their empty dishes, skittering around on the glossed wood, some of them cracking open like eggs, and from inside them—

“Hey!” Richie yells, pressing his back to the wall as the cookie nearest him cracks open and a fucking _eyeball_ comes crawling out of it.

Oh, nope. _Nope._ Fuck that. Eddie’s leaving, he’s running, he’s getting the fuck out of here and never looking back—

— but he also can’t get his legs to move.

“Hey, hey, that fortune cookie’s looking at me, man! What the _fuck!”_

Bev screams, toppling over a chair as a great big bat wing extends from the cookie at her seat, flapping around the table. Next to her, Bill stumbles back against the wall, and Eddie nearly gags at the sight of what comes out of _his_ fortune cookie— some kind of horrible mashed up amalgam of a cicada that’s too fucking big to be a cicada and has a fucking _baby’s head,_ a _human_ baby’s head growing out of it, whining and crying as it skuttles across the table on its spindly legs.

Something else is leaking up from beneath the rest of the cookies, something red-black and shining as it seeps up from the bottom of the bowl like bubbling motor oil until it spills over, but Eddie’s not looking at that. He’s not looking at any of it, it’s all in his peripheral vision as his eyes are drawn up and up and up, to the little flaps of paper from their fortune cookies hovering above them all as if suspended by a nonexistent wind.

Suspended, or floating.

Ben’s shouting, batting away a grotesque baby bird that’s flying at Stan with its feeble half-formed wings. Bill’s screaming something about none of this being real, it _can’t_ be real, and Richie’s still spewing profanities and grabbing a chair to start beating the table to death, but Eddie—

Eddie can’t stop staring at it, at the eight little pieces of paper floating above them all.

_WELCOME HOME LOSERS_

_THANKS FOR BRINGING A SNACK!_

Frannie screams, high-pitched and terrified, and it’s not until then that Eddie snaps out of it.

The fortune cookies on their end of the table have begun to burst, too, and from inside them, dozens upon dozens of rats come scurrying their way out, too many, _way_ more than could have possibly fit in those fucking balls of dough even _after_ they swelled up like balloons. And they’re not just _rats,_ they’re all wrong, too big and not quite alive, with whole patches of gray-brown fur falling away in clumps from sizzling blackened flesh, half-rotten limbs fumbling underneath them, eyes swollen and red and bursting like welts, and…

Fuck, he’s seen this before. Or at least he’s seen a less exaggerated version of it, a rat that got itself electrocuted by a faulty power line in the subway. That one hadn’t been as grotesque as _this,_ this is some fucked up Halloween-store bullshit version of it, but—

That’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is.

Frannie had been there, too. She’d only been four years old, she’d been the one that pointed it out to him and screamed and cried for the entire subway ride home, and she’s screaming now, clinging to his jacket and sobbing and trying to tug them both in the direction of the door, but fuck, the whole _room_ is filling up with more and more horrors, he won’t be able to get them to the door without fighting his way through a whole horde of fucking undead bats and baby-headed cicadas and half-formed birds and who fucking _knows_ what else—

He crouches down, blocking out everything else and focusing on Frannie.

“Honey, hey, look at me, it’s okay, just look at me,” Eddie says, and she doesn’t look at him but she _does_ surge forward and hug his neck so tightly that it hurts, so he wraps his arms around her and half-buries his face in her shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I promise we’re gonna get out of here, okay? I _promise_ it’s gonna be okay.”

Fuck, his own heart is pounding and he’s pretty sure he’s about to start crying right along with her.

“It’s _not real!”_ Mike’s shouting now, having joined Richie in his attempts to beat the whole table down to splinters with one of the abandoned chairs. Richie, on the other hand, has already dropped his chair and backed himself into a wall again, eyes scrunched shut as he mutters _it’s not real it’s not real it’s not real it’s not—_

“It’s not REAL!” Mike screams, punctuating every sentence with another slam of the chair down on the table. “It’s not REAL! It’s not—!”

“Excuse me?”

Abruptly, every horrible thing that had come bursting from the fortune cookies vanishes into thin air. The rats shriek as they explode into a burst of blackened fur and sinew. The cicadas and bats and birds crumble to dust that falls in thin swirling rivulets to the floor. The black tar goop trailing across the table is still there, though, and it creeps in its sizzling spread until it drips in great big globs off the edge of the table and onto the carpet.

The wide-eyed waitress does not seem to notice any of that.

“Is… everything alright, Mr. Hanlon?” she asks, eyeing him with his chair clutched in both hands, then the table he’d just been attacking, and then Frannie still quietly sobbing into Eddie’s neck.

“Yeah,” Richie answers for him, offering a smile that Eddie sure as hell _hopes_ isn’t his best attempt at looking casual, even though he knows it is. “Can we get the check?”

“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the _fuck,_ man?”

“Rich,” Ben says, laying a hand on Richie’s shoulder to stop his back-and-forth pacing around the parking lot, and he gestures with a nod at Frannie, still clinging for dear life to Eddie’s neck with her legs around his waist, and who is now quickly approaching the record for the longest time she’s _ever_ spent crying in her life.

Richie has enough grace to look guilt-stricken for about half a second, and then he’s right back to pissed off again.

“Oh, yeah, _sure,_ we just got done watching Pennywise’s Greatest Hits in there, but yeah, fucking sure, I’ll watch my _language,_ Haystack, wouldn’t want to _traumatize_ anyone,” Richie snaps, then tugs both hands through his hair. _“Fuck.”_

Honestly, Eddie has a hard time blaming him. And as much as he appreciates Ben thinking of Frannie, he’s also pretty sure she doesn’t give a single shit what any of them are saying right now.

“Mike, what the hell, man?” Richie demands, rounding on him.

“I didn’t—”

“You lied to us,” Eddie cuts in, rubbing Frannie’s back. “You lied to us, Mike. That’s not cool.”

Richie waves a hand at him. “Yeah! The first words out of your mouth should’ve been, ‘Hey, man, you wanna come back to Derry and get _murdered?’_ ‘Cause then I would’ve said no! It’s fuckin’ entrapment, man—”

“None of us would have come,” Bev agrees, quiet and deceptively calm even as the cigarette in her mouth shakes like a metronome set to full speed. Richie gestures at her with a pointed look at Mike as if to say, _See?_

But then she adds, “He couldn’t have told us, or none of us would have come.”

“Wha—? For _real?”_ Richie yells, throwing both hands up. “You’re telling me you’re just cool with it, us all getting roped into this shit when we had no fuckin’ clue what we were walking into—”

“I knew.”

That brings them all up short, even Richie, as every single one of them turns toward Stan.

He’s sitting on the curb, arms crossed and laid across his knees, one leg bouncing faster than Bev’s cigarette as he stares ahead at the asphalt.

“I knew,” Stanley says. “I didn’t know everything, I didn’t remember the clown, but— but I knew it was… something. Something bad. And you know what the _first thing_ I remembered was?” He looks up at them, eyes wide and shining with some emotion Eddie has a hard time placing, something other than fear. A muscle in his jaw twitches, and he resumes his thousand-yard stare at the asphalt, shaking his head. “It was that woman. The— the woman from the painting. The flute, the _teeth._ I— I almost…” He gulps. “Look, I didn’t know what it was, what _It_ was, but I knew what I was walking into. And so did you, Rich.”

“What? No, I—”

“You said that when Mike called, and I’m _quoting_ you here, you got so freaked out that you yakked over a balcony railing and forgot your own name on stage,” Stan goes on, unimpeded, eyes hard on Richie. And that’s news to Eddie, whether he brought that up before Eddie arrived or while Eddie was busy having a fucking heart attack in the hallway by the bathrooms, but now he just thinks of the dent in his passenger side door, the fear that gripped him when the call came up. “You didn’t remember everything, but you _knew.”_

“I think I did, too,” Ben admits, sitting heavily down on the curb beside him. “My heart was just—” he lightly taps a fist against his chest, eyes unfocused— “pounding right out of me.”

Bill nods, pressing the thumb of his right hand into the palm of his left. “But we came anyway. Because w-we made an oath—”

“Oh, _fuck_ the oath!” Richie shouts, whirling around on him.

“Richie—”

“No, Bev, _fuck_ the oath,” Richie cuts her off. “I’m serious—”

“Richie,” Mike pleads, “It’s already killed nine kids, and—”

“Yeah, and _this one—”_ Richie shouts over him, pointing at Frannie— “needs to get the fuck out of Dodge and never look back before she turns into the tenth!”

“Rich.”

And Richie, apparently not expecting any interruption at all from Eddie, sputters for half a second, and then he blinks wide _genuinely_ betrayed eyes at him from behind those coke bottle glasses. “Eds, are you—? Are you out of your fuckin’ _mind?_ You seriously aren’t already mapping out an escape route?”

And… well, yeah, he _is._ He certainly doesn’t want to stay here, and he wasn’t about to suggest to Richie that he _should._

He’s just, frankly, a little stunned that they’re not all trying to convince him otherwise, that even _one_ of them, even just Richie, even just Mike, isn’t trying to talk him into staying, into fighting with them and stopping the fucking clown because it’s what’s right. For some reason, he wasn’t expecting any of them to put the safety of _his_ kid over the safety of all the other kids in Derry.

He almost feels guilty for expecting anything less.

“Obviously Eddie needs to get out of Derry,” Mike says while Eddie’s still midway through trying to put a voice to what he’s thinking. “No one’s arguing that.”

“But the rest of us should stay,” Bill confirms. “We have to keep the oath, and f- f- finish what we started.”

“I’m in,” Stan says, clenching and unclenching his fist with a downright murderous glare directed at the ground several feet in front of him. “Let’s kill It right this time.”

“Me, too,” Bev agrees.

Ben nods, a strange mixture of resignation and grim determination on his face.

… Oh.

Eddie realizes, right then, that _none_ of them had even been questioning whether he should leave. They’d only been arguing on whether any of the rest of them should, too.

Richie’s hackles finally lower when he seems to come to the same realization at the same time.

“Nine kids, Jesus fuck,” Richie mutters, and he pushes his glasses up to push his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. Then he huffs and throws the hand up, annoyed resignation clear on his face and in his voice. “Yeah, shit. Fuck it. Guess I’m in, too.”

God, Eddie loves them. All of them.

That’s a terrifying thing to come to terms with right now, when he’s about to leave them behind to fight the thing that’s been lurking in the deepest darkest corners of all their worst nightmares for decades, but he loves them all so much it fucking _hurts._

“But how are we _getting_ them out of here?” Ben asks, shooting a concerned look at Eddie.

“Oh, I, uh— I drove,” Eddie tells him. “I can—”

“Eddie,” Bev softly interrupts. “I don’t know if it’s safe to drive.”

“What? I had, like, _two_ drinks.”

“That’s not what she means,” Mike tells him. “I don’t think it would be safe for _anyone_ to drive right now, especially not if they were trying to get away. I think… I think It would try to stop you, Eddie.”

Eddie gulps, heart sinking, and already he can’t help recalling the laundry list of automobile accidents he’s seen in his line of work, the photos from every single angle, crunch zones reduced to accordion pancakes, roofs and doors bent in so far there’s no question about whether the people inside survived or not. He thinks of the clown — God, the _fucking_ clown, _how the hell did he forget the fucking clown_ — and how It could make them see whatever the fuck It wanted. Blood coating every inch of the walls in Bev’s bathroom, Georgie one-armed and crying at the bottom of that cave, Bev’s dad yellow-eyed and grinning up from a ruffled clown collar, the fucking _leper_ with its tongue lolling out and its hollow eye sockets and—

It’s too easy to picture. It’s too easy, imagining Eddie trying to drive them out of here, in the _dark,_ already scatterbrained from having driven for nearly eight hours and from the craziness of the dinner. It’s too easy imagining something inhuman and horrifying walking out in front of the Escalade and sending them both careening off the road.

“Shit,” Eddie breathes, tucking his face into Frannie’s shoulder for a second while he thinks. He lifts his head, nods, and says, “Okay. Okay, I’ll call an Uber.”

“An Uber,” Richie parrots. _“That’s_ your plan, you’re gonna take a fuckin’ Uber to New York.”

“No, just—” Eddie huffs. “It can make kids see anything It wants, right? And apparently us, too, because It has like, a _thing_ for us, or something. But that’s it, isn’t it? Remember? Bev, you remember your bathroom?”

Bev pales even further, but she nods. “He couldn’t see it.”

“Exactly,” Eddie nods. “And the waitress had no clue what the hell we were all screaming about in there, right? So screw it, let the stupid clown show us whatever It wants, but as long as the Uber driver doesn’t see anything they’ll keep on going, right? I’ll call the Uber, take it a few towns over so we’re outside Its range. That’s all. And then I’ll still be nearby when you guys— you know. When It’s gone.”

“That’s…” Ben says, then tilts his head. “That’s actually not a bad idea.”

“W- wait,” Frannie suddenly croaks, leaning back and scrubbing at her face. Without her cooperation it becomes a whole lot harder to carry her, but she doesn’t protest when Eddie sets her down. It seemed to be her intention anyway, even if she doesn’t move from his side when her shoes touch the ground, remaining right there pressed against him with a fist held tight to his jacket. “Are we leaving?”

“Yeah, honey, we are.”

Fran sniffs. “Why?”

“Because… of what we just saw in there,” Eddie says. “That was— I mean, why _wouldn’t_ we leave?”

“But what _was_ all that?”

“Oh. Uh—”

God, he really had not been prepped for an explanation this soon. Eddie desperately roots around in his brain to see if there’s some child-friendly way to explain it, if there’s even _any_ way he can explain it, if there’s some kind of feasible lie that might make sense, something that might make this all seem less scary than it is, but he realizes pretty quickly that there isn’t. And in any case, he owes Frannie more than that. After everything she just saw, everything she just saw because of _him,_ he owes her so much more than that.

Honesty, at the very least.

He sighs. “We don’t really know what It is, sweetheart.”

“It’s a kind of monster,” Stan offers from where he’s still sitting on the curb. He looks as tired and worn down as ever, but Eddie thinks he can see something of the dad that Stanley is, that he’s become, in the soft smile he gives Frannie anyway. “Some kind of scary movie monster that makes people see the things they’re afraid of. That’s all.”

“But you said it killed a bunch of kids,” Frannie says, looking to Mike.

“I—” Mike starts, directing a panicked look at Eddie, then softly admits, “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“And it’s gonna kill more,” Frannie says. It’s not a question.

“Which is why we’re leaving,” Eddie says, gently running his fingers over the bumps of her newly fashioned braids. “It’s only in this town, so if we leave, you’ll be safe.”

For a moment, for one very tense and terrifying moment, Eddie worries that she’s going to try to argue. He worries that she’ll insist they have to stay, that she can help, that it doesn’t matter that she’s a kid. It’s an argument she wouldn’t have even a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, obviously, not with seven adults all firmly against the idea, but it’s an argument Eddie really does not want to have with her. Hell, he doesn’t want to have _any_ argument with her. Not now, not after all that shit they just saw.

Luckily, though, whether it’s because she can sense that it’s an argument she would never win or because she’s just _that_ shaken up, she only sniffs and half-turns toward Eddie, hugging his waist and pressing her cheek to his ribs.

Relief sends his shoulders sagging.

“You guys are all gonna stop it?”

“We’re sure as hell gonna try, kiddo,” Richie says, hands in his pockets and an uncharacteristically soft look on his face.

Mike adds, “We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.”

“Six against one, right?” Richie shrugs. “What could go wrong?”

“… Okay,” Frannie sniffs again, her voice wobbly. “There’s a first aid kit in my backpack in my dad’s car, and an extra Epi-pen and some granola bars, and he has one of those flashlights with the metal thing on it so it’s strong enough to break open a car window in case you get in an accident, and he keeps a pocket knife in his glove compartment, and you can take all of it and—” her voice hitches, and she turns and presses her face fully into Eddie’s chest. When she speaks, she’s very clearly crying again. “You’re gonna be really careful, right?”

“Of course, sweetie,” Bev answers right away, and there’s a general murmur of agreement from everyone else.

It’s an empty answer, purely for Frannie’s benefit and Eddie damn well knows it. They all do. There’s no being careful when it comes to Pennywise, no saying whether anyone will come out of the fight alive or not, no saying whether _It_ will come out of the fight alive or not.

And Eddie’s about to leave them to fight It alone. Or not alone, not really, but without him. Eddie rubs Frannie’s back again, and he looks up at the rest of them, wishing he could funnel everything he’s feeling into his eyes and knowing it’s impossible.

_I love you guys._

_I can’t believe it, but somehow I still love you guys every bit as much as I did back then, and it’s killing me to leave you like this._

“Yeah,” Eddie says with a strained smile, hoping the tears in his eyes are not as obvious as they feel. “What she said. Seriously, raid the whole car, all my suitcases are in there. Just— _please_ be careful, okay?”

Richie, who’s standing closest to him, reaches out and lays a firm hand on his shoulder. He looks like he might be on the verge of saying something heartfelt by the look on his face, something close to what Eddie’s thinking, but instead he leans in and says like it’s a secret just for the two of them:

“Call the goddamn Uber.”

He pats Eddie on the cheek and steps back, and Eddie laughs quietly, shaking his head.

“Thanks, guys,” he says, pulling out his phone. “Uh. Right. Actually, my phone’s off. Can someone—?”

“On it,” Ben says right away, having stood up again and begun pacing a bit, one hand on his hip and his eyes down on his phone. When he’s done, he holds up the screen facing Eddie, giving it a little wave. “Driver’s name is Dave. He’s two minutes out, and he’ll take you guys to Corinth, it’s about—”

“Half an hour away,” Eddie nods. “Seriously, guys. Thank you. It was… really, really good to see you guys again.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Richie says, rolling his eyes and then shooting a quick look down at the back of Frannie’s head. “Hey, Franabanana.”

Frannie’s answer is a very wet, very choked giggle, and then, “Yeah, Richie Itchy?”

Richie’s smile grows into one of those full-face eye-crinkling ones, and once again, Eddie’s hit with a sudden wave of— not even _nostalgia,_ whatever this is, something deeper and more visceral than that, something set in the marrow of his bones.

Before Eddie can figure out a name for it, Richie says, “You keep an eye on your dad, okay? Keep him outta trouble for us.”

“I’ll— I’ll try.”

Bev, again, is the first to run up to Eddie and wrap her arms tight around his shoulders. Eddie hugs her back as firmly as he can with one arm while the other is still wrapped around Frannie, and before he knows it there’s a hand on the back of his head and another arm around his upper back — Bill’s? Stan’s? Maybe both of them, it’s hard to tell with his face buried as it is in Bev’s shoulder, and they step away before he can look.

And then, already, he can hear tires rolling up into the parking lot behind him. It’s both entirely too soon and couldn’t have been soon enough.

A window rolls down, and the driver calls out, “Hanscom?”

“Yeah, that’s— that’s for me,” Eddie tells the driver, surreptitiously wiping his eyes as Bev steps back. He looks around at the rest of them, at the rest of the Losers, and says, “I mean it, guys. _Please_ be careful, okay? If there was any way I could stay—”

“We get it, Evel Knievel, you’d _throw_ yourself into the line of fire to save our sorry hides,” Richie says with more dramatic flair than is even remotely necessary, but then he softens again and gestures with a tilt of his head at the car. “Go get your kid outta here, man.”

Eddie sets his jaw and nods.

The Uber’s an older Corolla with a brownish tan paint job and a fine coat of grime on its roof and one of its hubcaps missing, but really, Eddie wouldn’t have expected anything less from Derry— hell, this is practically a brand new Rolls Royce by his current standards. He’d have taken a fucking lawnmower out of Derry if he had to.

Ben’s already opening up the back door, and Eddie gets Frannie situated in the far side of the backseat, behind the driver — safest seat in a car — and buckles her in and kisses the top of her head. In spite of the car’s less-than-stellar paint job, Eddie can’t help noticing the guy seems to take pretty good care of the interior. The leather seats are squeaky clean, at least, and there’s a Black Ice air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror so that it’s almost impossible to smell anything but that and the faint hint of leather and something vaguely tangy underneath.

The middle seat in the back’s got a seat belt, too, he notices, though it’s only one of those across-the-lap seat belts, the bare minimum in terms of a safety feature. Eddie considers how it’ll feel to sit in a car without the comfort of a shoulder strap keeping him from lurching forward in the event of an accident and slamming his head into the sides of the two front seats, and how _wrong_ it would feel in general not to have that added protection, and—

And then he considers sitting all the way on the passenger side of the backseat, separated from Frannie by a whole foot and a half, and he knows that’s just not gonna happen. No way in hell.

Eddie digs his keys out of his pocket and turns, placing them reverently in Ben’s outstretched hand. He holds the keys there for a second, his other hand on the underside of Ben’s palm, gripping tight.

“See you guys soon,” Eddie says, and he really desperately hopes it’s not just wishful thinking.

Ben gives him a smile that’s got traces of sadness at its edges, like he knows exactly how unlikely that is. And then, too soon, Eddie’s already let go of his hand and situated himself in the backseat with only a lap belt buckling him in, and the car doors shut him and Frannie out from the rest of the world.

The back seat is… tight. The floor is bisected by the center console and a set of cup holders, so Eddie sort of has to bend his legs up like a grasshopper to fit.

He manages. He slings an arm over Frannie’s shoulders, pulling her in close to his side. She’s still sniffling, but most of the waterworks seem to have subsided for now.

The driver, Dave, glances up at the rearview; Eddie catches a glimpse of a pair of grayish eyes in a slightly wrinkled face for about half a second under the Red Sox cap he’s wearing, and then they’re lost to the shifting shadows of the streetlights as he pulls them out of the Jade’s parking lot.

“Kid alright?”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Eddie says.

He pulls Fran a little closer and rests his chin on top of her head, watching the side streets and road signs past them by, listening to the low thrum of music playing from the guy’s radio. It sounds familiar, and Eddie somehow recognizes it as a Mötley Crüe song by the sound of the beginning riffs even though he hasn’t listened to a second of Mötley Crüe since he was fifteen. And rarely, even then. He has absolutely no idea what the song’s called.

Corinth, Maine.

Thirty minutes out of Derry. Is that gonna be enough?

Christ, if Eddie sees so much as a flicker of an orange pom pom out of the corner of his eye while they’re there, he’s gonna order another Uber and _actually_ take it all the way to New York. Fuck it, fuck the entire East Coast, he’ll get them to Bangor and then fly them to goddamn San Diego if he has to.

Under his arm, Frannie shivers, pulling him from his thoughts of cross-country flights and baggage claims and last minute hotel bookings.

“Hey,” Eddie whispers. “Want my jacket?”

She’d left her coat in the car since it was a rare pleasant evening in Maine, the temperature hanging steadily in the upper sixties. Now Frannie nods, peeling herself away from him for just long enough to let him work himself free of his zip-up — one benefit of the lap belt, anyway, since it doesn’t take as much finagling as it would have otherwise — and once he gets it off, Frannie slides her arms into it and then immediately wraps them tight around his waist.

Eddie asks, “You okay?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Well, that makes one of them. Eddie’s pulse is still rabbit thumping in his temples, and there’s still a hard stone of dread lodged in the pit of his stomach that he seriously doubts will leave him any time soon. Not until they pass the Derry town line at the very least, and likely not for a while after that. Probably not until he knows the clown is fucking dead.

He closes his eyes, realizes all he can see on the inside of his eyelids is those two points of yellow staring at him from the Jade’s maroon wallpaper, and suppresses a full body shudder before opening his eyes again.

Fuck, he can only imagine what Frannie’s seeing right now.

For some reason, though, when he opens his mouth to apologize to her, she _actually_ beats him to the punch.

“I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Huh?” Eddie blinks, craning his neck to try and see her face, but she’s firmly buried it in the space between his collarbone and his shoulder. “What? Why are _you_ sorry?”

Her answer comes out too muffled to make out.

“One more time?”

She sniffs. “You had to leave all your friends ‘cause of me.”

Eddie sits frozen for a second, then huffs a sad little laugh and lightly flicks the side of her head. “Hey, come on. You’re my friend, too, remember?”

She shrugs one shoulder and shrinks down against him.

“Hey, no, I mean it. Don’t feel sorry for a second, okay? I’m the one that’s sorry,” Eddie says, hugging her tighter. “I’m sorry you had to see all that. I shouldn’t have— I shouldn’t have let that happen. Shouldn’t have let you anywhere _near_ Derry, honey. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I should’ve,” Eddie shakes his head. “I should’ve remembered, and— and Stan was right. I didn’t remember what it was, not exactly, but I knew it wasn’t anything good, and I still took you along with me.”

“No, I mean you didn’t know I was coming with you,” Frannie reminds him, tipping her head back to look at him for a second before burrowing again. Her eyes were still a little red-rimmed, her cheeks a little blotchy, but she’s clearly feeling steady enough now to talk. “You didn’t _let_ me near Derry. I snuck in the car, remember?”

“Yeah, well, I should’ve turned right around as soon as I figured out you were with me.”

“But I told you not to.”

“True,” Eddie admits. “But still, you’re the kid and I’m the dad. It’s my job to keep you _away_ from scary things like that. It’s my job to protect you.” He gives her another squeeze and says, “Feels like I did a pretty crappy job of that today, huh?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t get hurt, so technically, you did do your job.”

Eddie smiles, ducking down to kiss the top of her head. “Thanks, honey.”

“It was really scary, though.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, face still in her hair. “Yeah, it was.”

“D’you think they’re gonna be okay?”

Eddie gulps, kisses her again, and says with about a hundred times more confidence than he feels, “Sure. You heard Ben, we did it before.”

 _“You_ did?”

“We all did,” Eddie tells her. “Back when we were kids. Not nine, we were… bigger kids. Thirteen, fourteen.”

Not that that makes any difference in Eddie’s mind now; a kid’s a kid, from six-year-old Georgie to nine-year-old Frannie to seventeen-year-old Betty Ripsom and everything in between. Probably makes a difference to Frannie, though. Four more years must seem like a whole other lifetime to her.

“We beat It once,” Eddie repeats. “If it was possible then, it’s possible now. And we’re grown ups now, so…”

He trails off, not exactly sure where he was going with that. If he’s being totally honest, somehow he feels like it’s _worse_ that they’re all adults now, like somehow whatever intangible thing that held them together as kids isn’t quite as strong now after decades apart. Like some of the things that are possible when you’re eleven or twelve or thirteen can’t quite be replicated as an adult, and if it can, there’ll be something… _off_ about it.

And it’s when he’s thinking that, thinking about a circle of cut palms in the fields outside the Barrens, that Eddie looks up at the rearview mirror and finds the Uber driver’s eyes on him again.

They maintain eye contact for a second, and then the driver’s gaze flicks back to the road.

His voice is low and gravelly when he asks, “Rough night, eh?”

“Yeah,” Eddie answers. “Rough night.”

The driver’s only response is a grunt, thank fucking God. Eddie does not have the energy to deal with a talkative Uber driver right now.

The track on the radio flips over to another song that Eddie’s fairly certain is also Mötley Crüe. The Black Ice air freshener sways beneath the rearview mirror, wafting its super strong scent all over the interior of the car, since it’s a little too cold around here to think about cracking open the windows. The scent of leather lingers underneath it, though, along with that vaguely tangy something that Eddie still can’t quite place.

A street sign comes and goes. From the quick glance Eddie gets, he almost thinks it reads _Canal Street,_ but that can’t be right. How the hell would they be only crossing Canal Street at this point? They’ve been driving for at least ten minutes.

Maybe there’s another Canal Street in one of the neighboring towns, too.

“Long drive to take this time of night.”

“Uh… yeah,” Eddie answers. The driver’s eyes are no longer on him, or probably not, since the light’s no longer hitting them in a way that Eddie can see. Honestly, the guy probably doesn’t even care one way or the other why they’re making this drive, but for some reason Eddie feels the need to justify himself anyway. “Car broke down.”

“Mm. _Really_ rough night, eh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it… has been,” Eddie says, tearing his eyes away from the rearview mirror and the driver’s worn Red Sox cap to watch the passing streetlights again instead. Then, because it occurs to him that thirty minutes _is_ kind of long for an Uber ride, he adds, “Thanks for coming out and making the drive, though.”

“Oh, now, don’t you worry about that,” the driver tells him. “It was my pleasure, Eddie.”

Eddie freezes.

He looks back to the rearview mirror, but the driver’s eyes still aren’t visible. Instead — like the mirror’s not quite working in the way that a mirror at that angle _should_ — all Eddie can see is a view as if taken from slightly above the guy’s face, his eyes and nose lost beneath the brim of his cap. All that’s visible is what’s below that; a close trimmed mustache, thin lips, a clean shaven jaw.

Eddie didn’t order the Uber.

Ben did.

He gulps, telling himself not to jump to conclusions just yet because— well, he grew up here, right? He’s taller and older and grayer than he was back then, sure, but maybe still recognizable. Maybe.

Eddie asks, “Do I… Do I know you? From somewhere?”

And he watches, feeling like an ice bucket’s been dumped over his fucking head, as the driver’s thin lips slowly split into a wide, Cheshire grin. 

“Y’know,” the driver says, “I think you just might.”

The mirror _creaks,_ tilting up apparently of its own accord, to reveal the driver’s gray eyes centered directly on Eddie’s. Thin veins of bright yellow have creeped their way into the gray, but it’s still the same eyes he saw when he sat down in the Uber in the first place, and Eddie realizes with horrible sudden clarity that he knows those eyes.

He knows that _face,_ twenty-seven years past or not.

And his stomach lurches with the understanding that he also, unfortunately, now knows exactly what that tangy scent under the leather and the Black Ice air freshener _actually_ is.

… Fuck.

The wrinkles on either side of Henry Bowers’ eyes deepen as he smiles even wider, and a passing street light illuminates his face in a bright sickly white for just long enough to reflect all that yellow in his eyes — and just long enough to show the small splatter of scarlet droplets on his cheek.

“Hiya, Eddie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> frannie being afraid of rats and making fun of richie's hair were both ideas from the lovely [@seven-syntheseas](https://seven-syntheseas.tumblr.com)
> 
> dave is borrowed from the book — he’s the cabbie who takes bill to the jade of orient, and he’s one of my favorite side characters ever, so… naturally i had to kill him without giving him a second of screentime lmao
> 
> (dave is also, coincidentally, my dad's name. lol sorry dad)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings for this chapter:** action violence, body horror, very very gross horror (the "i recently read a stephen king novel cover-to-cover" really jumps out here), blood, injury, a panic attack, allusions to physical abuse, a mention of guns, and one derogatory use of the word “queer” (though i softened bowers’ canonical tendency to use every slur in the dictionary when he speaks, so. y’know. there’s that)

“Bowers.”

Eddie’s throat is nothing but fucking sandpaper. His heart is trying to beat its way out through his _goddamn_ sternum. He unwinds his arm from around Frannie and holds it out in front of her instead like a barricade, as vulnerable a barricade as it may be, and gently pushes her back against the seat.

She whispers, “Dad?”

Eddie quickly glances down at her and shakes his head.

Then he brings his gaze back to the rearview, where the easy smile on Bowers’ face is visible, but not much else. When he looks directly at Bowers, all he can make out in the dim light of the car is the line of his jaw, the silhouette of his ear, his thumb tapping out a slow beat on the steering wheel.

“Bowers—” Eddie gulps, then corrects, _“Henry.”_

This isn’t the clown, Eddie tells himself. This isn’t the clown, not technically, not directly. This isn’t _It._ This is a person. A person that’s been twisted and manipulated and was… kind of an awful piece-of-shit human being to begin with, if Eddie’s memory serves, sure. Racist and sexist and every-other-kind-of-ist, yeah.

But _fuck,_ he’s still not the clown.

This is a person, and people can be reasoned with. Sometimes.

Right now that’s a shot Eddie’s willing to take. It’s a shot he _has_ to take.

“Henry, listen to me,” Eddie says, quickly going through a mental stock of everything he’s got on him, which is… not much. His phone’s off. His keys are with the others. His pocket knife is in his car. His inhaler is in his jacket, which Frannie’s wearing now, but a lot of fucking good his inhaler would do for him in this situation anyway. “Look, I don’t know what It’s putting in your head, but—”

“He told me, you know that?” Bowers asks, like he hasn’t heard a single word that Eddie’s said, or he just doesn’t care that Eddie was speaking at all. Probably the latter. He keeps tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel to the beat of the Mötley Crüe song still strumming through the speakers, but he’s only tapping on the offbeat and missing every few beats.

“… He?”

“The moon,” Bowers tells him, as casually as if he’s talking about the fucking weather. His voice drawls, slow and lilting and lazy. “He talks to me, sometimes. He told me. Told me how to find you, Eddie. Told me about Davie and his shitty little car coming to pick you up and take you out of Derry… Told me all I had to do was take him outta the picture, and I could use his car to find you. Y’know, I’ve been… _waiting…_ to see you again, Eddie. All these years. You and all your friends.”

Eddie gulps.

“Henry. Listen,” Eddie tries again. “I get it. But my kid is in this car, okay? She’s— Henry, she’s a _kid._ She’s just a kid.”

The easy smile on Bowers’ face falls away, twitching at the corners before his upper lip curls back in a grimace.

“So was I,” Bowers tells him, _reminds_ him. “I was a kid when you and all your little queerboy friends pushed me down that well. Left me to fuckin’ rot, that’s what you all fuckin’ did.”

“Henry—”

“Sixteen years old, and left to fuckin’ rot…”

And the thing is, Eddie remembers it. Sort of. He remembers flashes. Neibolt and the sewers, that twisted woman with her rows and rows of teeth on Stanley’s face. He remembers Bill running off, he remembers Georgie, he remembers the Leper’s jaws opening wide and putrid vomit taking up his entire field of vision.

But before all that he remembers Mike, the last one to make it down the well. He remembers the panic, the worry that Mike wasn’t gonna make it down there with them at all.

And a body — Bowers’ body — freefalling straight past them.

 _We didn’t push you,_ Eddie can’t help thinking, even though he knows it absolutely does not fucking matter at all. Not now. _None of us pushed you, you fell, and only because you were attacking Mike and he fought back._

_You were gonna kill him._

“Henry, listen to me—”

“And do you know who else was just a kid, Eddie?”

As Bowers’ eyes roll toward the mirror, Eddie sees that the once grayish irises have been nearly entirely taken over with reflective gold, gleaming like a cat’s.

“Do you know who else was just a _fuckin’ kid?”_

It happens like this:

Eddie’s watching Bowers like a hawk, watching the movement of his thumb on the steering wheel, watching his eyes in the mirror, watching for any indication whatsoever that he’s about to turn around to attack them or that he’s gonna yank the wheel and send all three of them for a head-on collision with the nearest tree.

Then Eddie blinks, and the empty passenger seat is no longer empty.

“Jesus— _shit!”_ Eddie shouts, pressing himself and Frannie as far into the backseat as he can.

The smell in the car is _fucking overpowering,_ Jesus Christ, the air freshener doesn’t stand a chance anymore against this, against the stench of mildew and shit caked into greywater-logged clothes, of rotting viscera and burst-open fly-eaten flesh over two decades old.

There _are_ flies in the car now, Eddie realizes, dozens upon dozens of flies humming and buzzing around Patrick Hockstetter’s head, around his limp greywater soaked hair, crawling across the passenger side window and the windshield, and Eddie automatically holds his breath to avoid sucking anything in—

The dead thing that used to be Patrick Hockstetter twists around in its seat, and Eddie’s mind does not even have the time to register how horrifying it looks before he acts — that’ll come after, when it’s all seared into his retinas like a flash camera afterimage. After, when all he can see is the maniacal lipless grin splitting Patrick’s swollen blue-skinned face in half, the rotting teeth, the blank white-jelly eyes, the glint of metal from the knife in its pruned hand.

And, of course, after, when he registers the crunch of rotting flesh giving way beneath his fist and _immediately_ gags.

“Frannie, don’t—” he covers his mouth with his forearm against the urge to gag again— “don’t look, okay? Don’t— _oh God that’s so gross Jesus Christ—”_

Frannie’s not screaming but she might be crying. Eddie genuinely can’t tell past the sound of Bowers laughing and Hockstetter’s crackling disused voice and the buzzing flies and his own gagging, because Patrick’s _entire jaw just fell off_ and now he’s swinging the knife in a wide arc at Eddie—

It’s sheer adrenaline, his entire brain as abuzz as the interior of the car and all its fucking _disgusting_ flies. Thanks to the car’s minimal legroom Eddie’s legs had already been bent up, and it only takes a quick jerk of his knee to bring his foot up into the space between the car’s front seats.

He drives the heel of his shoe into what’s left of Patrick Hockstetter’s face and tries _so_ hard not to gag again when the soft rotten tissue and decades-old bone gives like paper mache.

Eddie holds his breath, squeezes his eyes shut, draws back his knee, and kicks again.

Patrick falls back against the dashboard, his crackly voice now nothing but a wet gurgle from his destroyed face and concave skull, his dead limbs barely able to do more than twitch, the knife loose in his open hand, and Eddie thinks — more than a little bizarrely — of zombie movies and comic books and _everyone knows you have to go for the head,_ and how Eddie’s foot essentially just served the same purpose as a shotgun, reducing what was technically the engine of Patrick’s reanimated corpse into a useless mush of brain matter or at least he _goddamn well better hope so—_

Bowers is still laughing.

Bowers is laughing, fucking _cackling_ like this is all the funniest goddamn thing he’s ever seen, and then he switches his grip on the steering wheel to free up his right hand and snatches the knife from Hockstetter’s loose fingers.

His laughter abruptly cuts off, his thin lips curled up in a scowl in the rearview mirror, and Eddie remains frozen stock still in the hanging silence of the car before Bowers says:

“Your time’s up, Eddie.”

And that’s all the warning he gets.

The next instant Bowers brings the knife down, and Eddie jerks his leg back with an undignified yelp just in time for the blade to slice through the bottom of his pant leg instead of stabbing clean through his shin.

Bowers doesn’t stop there.

He twists in his seat, having entirely abandoned the steering wheel in favor of the fun new prospect of poking as many holes in Eddie as he can, and Eddie swings a punch at him and misses as the car lurches over what must have been a curb.

“Bowers, don’t— Bowers, the _fucking road—!”_

“Quit _squirming,_ ya—”

Eddie’s next right hook lands… somewhere, judging by the throb of pain that ratchets up from his knuckles all the way to the elbow, and the fact that Bowers’ voice cuts off with a growling yell. Another burst of pain erupts from somewhere around his left shoulder, and then—

Then the car fucking crashes.

There’s a hollow _pop_ and a crunch as the windshield shatters. The airbags go off, and Henry lets out something that’s half a grunt and half a _woosh_ of air leaving his lungs, while the thing that used to be Patrick Hockstetter does nothing but get slingshotted with a wet _flump_ into the passenger seat.

Eddie feels himself thrown forward with the momentum, and his head smacks into the shoulder of one of the two seats. The leather seat backing is soft enough that it doesn’t immediately kill him on impact, but it’s plenty firm enough to send his vision full of stars.

“Ah, sh— _shit,_ Fr— Frannie?”

“Dad? _Dad!”_

In his swimming peripheral he sees her lean back with a terrified squeal, arms flung in front of her as a blurry Bowers-sized shape lunges through the space between the seats, and on instinct Eddie tries to throw his left arm up to shield her too but his left arm _doesn’t fucking respond at all—_

There’s a strange and oddly familiar hiss, and then Bowers gives an unholy shriek like someone’s gouged his fucking eyes out.

“Leave us ALONE!”

“You— _fucking_ little—”

Eddie’s vision ekes its way back into clarity, the world teetering back and forth in a clumsy attempt to reorient to its proper axis, and Eddie realizes that Frannie just unloaded the entire contents of his inhaler into Bowers’ eyes like it was a can of pepper spray.

It _shouldn’t_ have worked, Eddie doesn’t think, at least not as effectively as actual pepper spray would have, but Bowers rears back screaming bloody murder anyway, his eyes wild and bloodshot to hell and still so fucking _yellow_ beneath all the red.

Eddie makes a quick grab for the knife that’s now lodged in his left shoulder — and when the fuck _that_ got there and why he isn’t freaking out over it more Eddie has no idea, fuck, he’s probably in shock and he is gonna be so goddamn pissed off if he’s in shock and he survived the clown only to bleed out from a wound he got from Henry fucking Bowers — and without giving himself even half a second to think about it, he pulls the knife out of himself and stabs it directly into Bowers’ stomach.

For a moment, no one moves. Bowers stops screaming, and instead he stares wide-eyed and slack-jawed at the knife sticking out of his gut.

Eddie yanks it out again and stabs it back in a few inches higher. Just to be sure.

“Dad?”

Frannie’s voice is steadier than he’d expected, especially given his own is small and breathless when he answers, without looking at her, probably staring at Bowers with just as shocked a look on his own face.

“Frannie, get out of the car.”

He hears her unbuckling her seatbelt and hurriedly shoving the car door open.

As Bowers staggers backward against the gearshift and the slowly deflating airbag, the knife comes sliding easily out of him, still in Eddie’s hand, and a squelch of black blood comes spilling over onto his shirt. Eddie has the sudden blinding flash memory of Ben, little thirteen-year-old Ben with his belly caked in blood and mud and grass, all red and green like some kind of fucked up Christmas ornament, the letter H hacked in his skin.

Bowers is slowing down. His eyes remain manic and fixed on Eddie as he leans back, apparently sapped of all the strength he’d need to get up, one hand ineffectually flopping around like he means to grab something and can’t quite manage it. His breath comes in slow and leaves as nothing but a gurgling wheeze.

He’s dying, Eddie realizes.

After a bit of fumbling with his seat belt buckle, Eddie realizes that his left hand is not cooperating at _all,_ and shit, he doesn’t want to risk relinquishing his only means of self defense, so finally he just reaches down and slices straight through the belt strap with the knife.

“You should cut that fucking mullet,” Eddie finds himself saying, shuffling out of the car’s back seat. “It’s been like thirty years, man.”

His awkward stumble out of the car brings with it a veritable _wall_ of pleasantly cool evening air, no flies and no waterlogged dead bodies and no sickening tang of blood, and Eddie takes in a great big gulp of it like a man that’s almost just drowned.

And— well. There’s _mostly_ no smell of blood.

The smell of smoke from the Corolla’s destroyed engine isn’t great, either.

Frannie’s standing in front of him in the grass, dwarfed in his jacket with her arms hugged around herself, and Eddie gives her an immediate once-over to check for injuries. There are none that he can see, not by the scant light out here at least, but she just got rattled around in a car slamming into a street light pole at who-knows-how-many miles an hour. Seat belt or no seat belt, that is _not_ a small thing to happen to a girl that’s seventy pounds soaking wet.

“Are you—? You okay?”

Without hesitation she nods, and then her eyes are fixed on his shoulder. “Are _you_ okay?”

“I, uh— yeah, yeah, no, I’m fine,” Eddie dismisses, retracting Bowers’ knife back into its handle and tucking it into his pocket so he’s got a free hand. He reaches up and presses his palm against the brand new hole in the fleshy space just beneath his rotator cuff — and _fuck_ does that hurt like nothing he’s ever felt in his life, but he grits his teeth and maintains pressure as best he can.

If Eddie had enough presence of mind for it, he thinks there _should_ be a firestorm of emotions swirling through his head right now. Fear, mostly. Obviously. But disappointment, too, and horror at the fact that he just _killed_ a guy, and guilt over the faceless Uber driver’s death, and worry over Frannie, and exhaustion, and who the hell knows what else.

Instead, he takes a look at their surroundings, and all he can feel is pissed off.

They’re in _Bassey fucking Park._

What did Bowers fucking _do_ the whole time they were in the car, just roll around the same six square blocks for fifteen minutes?

How the _fuck_ did Eddie miss that?

“Dad?”

“I’m—” Eddie huffs, grits his teeth, presses harder into the wound. “Sorry, honey, I’m fine.”

“Dad, you’re _bleeding._ You’re not fine!”

“Not bleeding all that much,” Eddie lies through his teeth — literally, since his jaw’s clenched tight against the urge to groan — and he only feels marginally guilty for it. He flexes the fingers of his left hand, finds it at least _sort of_ functional, and tests it a little further by tapping his thumb to his forefinger and then his middle finger, back and forth a few times. He misses about three out of ten times, but at this point he’ll take it.

He fishes his phone out of his pocket and turns it on, and while it’s powering up, he gestures for Frannie to follow him… somewhere. Anywhere other than right next to the crumpled Corolla that’s holding the dead or dying body of Henry Bowers in it.

They traverse about half the little park by the time Eddie’s phone _dings_ to indicate it’s turned on, and by then, Eddie can’t even smell the smoke from the accident anymore.

They sit down on a curb, Frannie huddled close to his right side, his right palm flat on the wound in his opposite shoulder, and with his barely functioning left hand he manages to scroll through his recent calls, all the way down until he hits the one with the 207 area code.

Mike picks up on the first ring.

_“Eddie?”_

“Hey,” Eddie says, voice flat as he stares across the street at a row of trees, the street lights illuminating perfect circles of pavement every thirty yards. “So, Bowers killed my Uber driver.”

There’s a beat of silence. Distantly, Eddie thinks that sounded like the set up of a really weird joke. _So an escaped convict, a risk analyst, and a nine-year-old walk into a car._ There’s no punchline — maybe Richie’d think of one — but there were several punches, and Eddie’s got the throbbing in his knuckles to prove it.

Hm. There is a nonzero chance that he’s getting a bit delirious.

_“Eddie. Where are you?”_

“Bassey Park,” Eddie tells him. The street lights surge, and for a moment that should be frightening but is mostly just exhausting, he imagines they’re about to morph into carnival lights, rotating and bobbing like the lights on a carousel.

But they don’t. Just rural Maine’s shoddy fucking electrical work.

 _“Okay,”_ Mike’s saying in his ear. _“Okay, hang tight. We’ll be there soon. Are you hurt? What about Frannie, is she okay?”_

“She’s okay, just shaken up,” Eddie tells him, then tips his head to the side to bump it against hers. “Right, honey?”

Frannie nods against his upper arm.

Eddie does not answer the former of Mike’s two questions. Nothing they can do about it until they get here anyway.

_Bowers killed my Uber driver._

What did Bowers do to him, Eddie wonders? What the fuck did he do with the _body?_ If they walk back and open the trunk of that car right now, are they gonna find the exsanguinated body of Dave the Uber Driver, all folded up and dead-eyed staring up at them? Will Hockstetter even still be in the car? Or will his zombified body be hidden like everything else It conjures up, like the blood in Bev’s bathroom and the leper under Neibolt and—

_It told me how to find you, Eddie._

_Told me about Davie and his shitty little car coming to pick you up and take you out of Derry._

“Hey, um… hey, Mike?” Eddie asks through the sudden lump in his throat. “I think you might have been right, y’know that? I think— I think you were right.”

Mike goes very quiet. He doesn’t ask what Eddie thinks he was right about. He can probably guess, because the next thing Mike says is a very heartfelt, barely audible:

_“I’m so sorry, Eddie.”_

“Yeah. Me, too. ‘Cause I don’t… I don’t think we can leave Derry, Mike. I think you were right. I don’t think we can leave. I don’t think It’ll let us.”

“It doesn’t look like it hit anything major.”

Ben peers underneath the gauze he’s been pressing into Eddie’s bare shoulder for the last ten minutes, his voice calm and level.

“The bleeding’s just about stopped, but I’m gonna give it another minute or two, just in case. That okay?”

Eddie gulps, nods. He’s sitting on the edge of the _very_ cold bathtub in the en suite attached to the room he’d rented at the Derry Town House, his bloodied shirt balled up in his lap, and Ben is sat on the closed toilet seat, hunched over to get eye level with the hole Bowers poked in Eddie, his hands gentle where he’s prodding at the muscle and bone all around Eddie’s bare shoulder.

In the bedroom, Eddie can just barely make out the sound of the others talking; he catches Frannie’s low but rapidfire speech in the way only someone whose ears have been attuned to that voice for nine years _could,_ and he thinks— she sounds okay. Not great, but okay. At the very least she’s not hysterical, and maybe not any more traumatized than she very obviously must be.

She sounds like she’s telling Bev and Stan and Bill and Mike all about what happened, recounting every second like it’s a scene in one of her chapter books.

In the doorway, Richie’s still leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, being… uncharacteristically quiet. He’s made a few half-assed jabs at Eddie, a few old tried-and-true jokes that Eddie didn’t even quite process through the fog in his head, but then he just… clammed up. He isn’t even looking at Eddie or Ben anymore, hasn’t looked at them much at all since Eddie peeled off his bloodied polo — which, yeah, Eddie can’t blame him for that. He can’t even imagine the state his shoulder’s in right now, precisely because he’s refused to look at it, too.

But Richie’s just standing there, _quiet,_ eyes fixed on the spot where the far wall meets the ceiling, fingers drumming on his bicep.

“Eddie?”

He blinks, looking down to find Ben’s eyes on him. “Huh?”

“I said I’m gonna start cleaning it, okay?”

“I, uh—” Eddie clears his throat. “Yeah, that’s… Yeah.”

Ben nods, laying a fresh square of gauze onto the wound and pressing his palm into it again, probably to get any last residual bits of blood dabbed away. Gentle, gentle, gentle.

Well. His _hands_ are gentle, anyway. His eyes, on the other hand, are almost cold in a way that’s… strangely comforting, for reasons that Eddie can’t totally place. It’s meticulous and calculating, all emotion tucked away to the side, the sort of no-nonsense determination that Eddie _wants_ to see in the guy who’s treating his fucking stab wound. Obviously.

But it’s also a look that brings with it a weird, delayed onslaught of _déjà vu._

He’s seen that look before, Eddie realizes. He’s seen that very same look on this very same face, plus-or-minus a few crow’s feet around the eyes and some extra baby fat around the cheeks. It’s the same look Ben would get whenever he set about building something, though right now the dam in the Barrens is the only thing that comes to mind.

The dam in the Barrens, and—

“Holy shit,” Eddie murmurs.

Ben freezes. His eyebrows tick up just a bit. Even Richie breaks from his thoughtful peering up at the ceiling to shoot a look down at Eddie.

Eddie asks, “You think that old clubhouse is still there?”

The concerned look on both their faces falls away, and Ben gives him one of those shy smiles that apples up his cheeks. Richie huffs a laugh, shaking his head and returning to his silent watch of the fucking ceiling cobwebs.

“Should be,” Ben says, tossing the gauze in the bathroom wastebasket. “If I remember right, it should’ve held up.”

“Is it weird that I kind of want to go looking for it?” Eddie asks, then hastily corrects himself, “Not like. Now. I mean when… you know—”

“When it’s not dark,” Ben finishes for him. “After we’ve all gotten some sleep?”

“Yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

Finally, _finally,_ Richie speaks up, even if he’s still not looking at either of them. “Yeah, fuck it, why not?” he asks, and then slips seamlessly into a British accent that is almost frustratingly on point. “Right good home base for the war effort, innit?”

Eddie shoots a look up at him. “What, we’re in a war, now?”

Richie shrugs, his whole stupidly tall body moving with it. There’s one good thing about him hovering in the doorway, anyway; his big broad shoulders effectively block up the entire view, so even if Frannie got it in her head to peek into the bathroom she wouldn’t be able to see her dad’s _fucking stab wound,_ which is. Good. That Richie’s standing in the way. So that doesn’t happen.

“Kinda feels that way, doesn’t it?” Richie asks, his magnified eyes narrowing thoughtfully behind the glasses. “Wonder if Maine has open carry— actually, no, who am I kidding, course it does. It’s fuckin’ _Maine,_ I can probably pick up a whole goddamn… what’s-it-called—”

“Arsenal?” Ben offers.

“Thank you, Haystack,” Richie says with an incline of his head. “A whole goddamn arsenal at the nearest fuckin’ Wal-Mart. You guys think those Stand Your Ground laws still count when it’s against Lovecraftian shapeshifting murder clowns? Or d’you think that’d be an exception? Like, where’s the line, you know? Is murdering an eldritch being defensible in court?” Then his voice drops an octave and picks up a southern drawl as he wilts against the door frame and says, “Oh, but _Aw-_ fiss-ah, I suh- _wear_ that dead body just _looks_ like a man in a clown suit, I swear it on my mama—”

“Easy there, Daniel Craig,” Stanley’s voice comes from the bedroom, utterly devoid of emotion, and Richie breaks, bending at the waist and his whole body already shaking with one of those silent breathless laughs of his.

Richie leans back and says something over his shoulder about Stanley being a _little Georgia peach,_ but Eddie’s attention is abruptly ripped away by a fucking railway spike being driven through his shoulder.

 _“Fuck,_ Ben, that— that really fucking hurts,” Eddie grits out, and lacking any better options he latches onto Ben’s sleeve with his right hand, clenching it tight enough that the pain in his fingers becomes a tiny, tiny distraction.

“Sorry,” Ben winces, dabbing away a little bit of the antiseptic with another piece of gauze. “Sorry, I know, I just gotta make sure it’s clean.”

“I know,” Eddie nods, a little more frantically than he means to. “I know. Sorry. I— thanks.”

Because he does know.

Just like he knows — and _has_ known — that he should have immediately gone to a hospital and not the fucking Derry Town House as soon as he was well enough to move. He knows, and has known, that the first number he called when he turned his phone on should not have been Michael Hanlon’s as-yet-unsaved number in his recents, and it should have been fucking 9-1-1. He knows, and has known, that someone is eventually going to stumble upon Bowers’ body and maybe another body in the trunk of that crumpled Corolla and that the police are going to investigate it and then he’ll _really_ be fucked, no matter what Mike says about how apathy lays over Derry like a dark impenetrable cloud thanks to It, no matter whether it was self defense or not.

And Eddie obviously knows, and has known, that it should be a doctor treating his injury right now and not one of his best friends, no matter how gentle his hands are, no matter how meticulous and determined his eyes may be.

But going to the hospital, for some reason, is just…

It wasn’t gonna happen. It was never gonna happen. Even thinking about Derry Home Hospital still sends a bolt of dread through the exhausted fog of his mind, sends a shudder all the way up his spine, lights up a bunch of old wires in his brain that are dusty from disuse but still manage to choke out one last signal that says, _Fucking nope! Steer clear!_ And besides, it was nearing midnight when he stumbled out of that car, and there was no way he could have justified dragging Frannie to a hospital when _she_ wasn’t hurt and all he wanted to do was get her to a bed, and she had already been through _so much_ in the last few hours, and he sure as _shit_ wasn’t letting her out of his sight after all that, so either they were _both_ going to a hospital or _neither_ of them was, and—

Going to the hospital still probably would have been the better choice, he thinks. The smarter choice. Jesus Christ, he had a foreign object _inside his body,_ and who fucking knows where that knife had been before it was in him (Eddie does, Eddie knows, it was in Bowers’ dad’s carotid artery and then it was in the greywater rivers under Neibolt and then it apparently got into the hands of a long-dead teenage boy with his skin sloughing off worse than the leper’s and Eddie _should be freaking out more than he is—)_

“Eddie?” Ben asks, his big worried eyes searching Eddie’s. “Woah, hey. Breathe.”

Oh.

Oh, he _is_ freaking out. Okay.

That makes more sense.

“I— uh— _fuck,_ I need—”

His inhaler. He needs his inhaler. Except Frannie emptied the whole thing into Henry Bowers’ eyes, probably saving both of their skins, which means he’s got nothing whatsoever to kick his breath back into step, and—

Richie spits a curse, glancing over his shoulder and then stepping fully into the bathroom, clicking the door shut behind him.

“Eddie,” Ben says again, gentle, gentle, gentle. “Hey, it’s okay. Can you breathe with me?”

“So, I got a question,” Richie cuts in at full volume before Ben can say anything else or Eddie can articulate that he _can’t_ breathe, and he leans back against the wall across from where Ben’s sitting on the toilet seat, head turned toward Eddie. “Very serious question, very important. Didn’t get the chance to ask before and it’s been bugging the hell outta me, and now you can’t escape—” he gestures with a casual wave at Eddie’s entire general hyperventilating being— “so I finally get to ask.”

“Rich, is this really—?”

“The time? Oh, abso- _lute_ -ly, Haystack. Like I said, he can’t weasel his way out of it now, right? So Eddie,” Richie says, letting his back slide down the wall a bit until he’s crouched and just about at Eddie’s eye level. “Eddie. Eds. Eddie Spaghetti. You knew this was coming. You _had_ to know this was coming, there is no way you didn’t know this was coming. So I ask you—”

A beat.

“What the _fuck_ kind of name is Francine for a nine-year-old, huh?”

Eddie, through the haze of the wheezing breaths rattling through his throat and the panicked rabbit thumping of his heart beat, is both instantly relieved that the serious question is not actually a serious question (he has had plenty of _serious_ in the last few hours, fucking thanks) and instantly annoyed.

“R- Really?”

“Yep,” Richie says, popping the _p._ He’s sitting down fully on the floor now so he has to look up to meet Eddie’s eyes, his long legs bent up in the scant space of the bathroom floor, his knee poking Ben in the shin. “A nine-year old. Named _Francine._ Come on, man.”

“I- I can’t— _fucking_ believe—”

“Oh, and yeah, Ben, go ahead and hide that smile all you want, we all know you agree with me.”

Sure enough, Ben’s got a half-amused half-perplexed look on his face, but he’s also got a warm steady hand on Eddie’s upper back and his thumb moving back and forth, so Eddie forgives him pretty much instantly. Instead of agreeing aloud he shakes his head and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“C’mon, don’t be afraid to back me up on this, Haystack. Cast your vote.”

“Think I’ll abstain, thanks.”

Richie leans his head back against the wall and blows a loud, obnoxious raspberry through his lips, and Eddie directs a glare down at him, finally annoyed enough to squeeze the words out of his spasming lungs if it fucking kills him.

“Sh- she’s named after my father, dipshit.”

And that, shockingly, gets Richie to falter for a second, his mouth hanging open. Something seems to clear up in those too-big-behind-the-glasses eyes, and he shakes his head. “Holy shit, your dad’s name _was_ Francis, wasn’t it? Or… fuck, wait. Frank!” He snaps his fingers, points at the ceiling and nods. “That was it.”

“Y- yeah,” Eddie wheezes, pressing the heel of his free hand into his sternum. His other hand’s still gripping tight to Ben’s sleeve. “And I didn’t name a _nine-year-old_ Francine, dumbass. I named a baby Francine.”

“Oh, yeah, ‘cause that doesn’t just make it worse.”

“Again. Named after my father. You asshole.”

Richie’s unperturbed, smiling and shaking his head. “Still cannot believe you raised a whole tiny human from a _baby,_ Eds.”

“Fucking— believe it, dickhead.”

“How big was she?”

The answer requires almost no real thought whatsoever, which is nice. Rattling off numbers. “Seven pounds, four ounces. Eighteen and a quarter inches.”

“Ho-ly _shit,”_ Richie laughs, holding up his hands in front of him like he’s trying to measure out what eighteen and a quarter inches looks like, and for a moment Eddie is absolutely certain he’s gonna make a horrendously ill-timed joke about the size of his dick — _almost as long as my wang,_ a little nerdy thirteen-year-old Richie is saying in the peripheral of his still spotty memory — but instead he says, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I could’ve held her in one arm like a football.”

Eddie sputters for a second. “Wha— _oh,_ my God, you cannot hold a baby like—”

“A very delicate football,” Richie assures him, as if that makes any fucking difference at all. “A glass football. To be handled with the utmost care.”

“If you held my infant daughter like _any_ kind of football, I would have _actually_ been legally fucking obligated to strangle you with my bare hands, you know that.”

“Ooh, _honey,_ don’t threaten me with a good time.”

Eddie presses his lips together, because no, he is _not_ going to laugh at that, damn it. He is _not_ going to laugh at Richie making a fucking _erotic asphyxiation joke_ right off the heels of a debate about the proper way to hold a baby. He’s not.

Okay, maybe he is. A little. His chest still hurts from the minor asthma attack that has since come and gone, and he’s fucking _exhausted_ from it — and from everything else — so he tips forward and drops his head on Ben’s shoulder, his own shoulders shaking a bit with a silent laugh.

Ben’s laughing softly, too. Eddie can feel it, that and the hand that Ben’s still running up and down his back.

“I can’t stand you, dude,” Eddie breathes.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he hears Richie answer, and it’s both way too fond and oddly familiar. There’s something Eddie’s missing there, he knows. It’s some key memory, and it takes him a few seconds to wade through that _dejá vù_ feeling again before he manages to fill in the gaps with something that he’s… at least ninety percent sure actually happened.

The boys’ room in their old high school. Eddie, sitting on the floor hyperventilating while the walls spun around him, refusing to use his inhaler for _some_ reason he still can’t remember or just doesn’t wanna think about, and Richie— little bug-eyed awkwardly tall Richie, sitting in front of him with his legs all bent up like they are now and babbling about literally anything under the sun.

_Fine, you don’t wanna use the inhaler, I hear ya loud and clear, Eddie baby. Distraction it is, then, ol’ chum! Right-oh, cap’n! Wot wot!_

_God, you’re the worst, that accent is the worst, I can’t fucking stand it and you know it._

Richie, with a big knowing smile on his face. Richie, shuffling around the floor until they’re side by side. Richie, slinging an arm around his shoulders.

_Yeah, yeah, I know, Eds._

“Distraction,” Eddie murmurs at Ben’s shoulder before he realizes he’s done it, because— shit, that’s exactly what Richie was doing wasn’t he? And it _worked._ How the hell did he even remember that before Eddie did?

Eddie leans back and takes one last steadying breath, and Richie doesn’t say anything else, but out of the corner of his eye Eddie definitely sees him smiling down at the floor.

“All— all good,” Eddie says to Ben, who’s still kind of watching him like he’s about to crumble into dust. “I— yeah, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ben tells him, and he sounds like he means it, because of course he does. Then he taps Eddie just above the collarbone, indicating the gaping hole about three inches down and to the left. Or it might be gaping, anyway. Eddie doesn’t know because he still refuses to look at it; much easier to put his trust in Ben and not even let himself get into the remote fucking _vicinity_ of thinking about it. “Just gotta bandage this up and you’ll be good as new.”

“Except for the battle scar,” Richie adds with a sagely nod.

“Except for the battle scar,” Ben concedes, unwinding a roll of ace bandage.

And Eddie can’t help asking the question that comes next, not even because he expects that either of them will have any kind of answer; they must be every bit as lost as he is right now, regarding the elephant in the room. The big terrifying elephant decked out in orange pom poms and white frills.

But he has to ask, because even if none of them have a single clue, they better damn well _find_ one, and soon.

“And then what?” Eddie asks, and his voice comes out quieter than he intended as he looks to both of them in turn. “Then what do we do?”

“Then…” Ben says, his hands steady as they set about winding the ace bandage below Eddie’s left arm and over his shoulder. He sighs, and from the sound of it he isn’t any more sure of himself right now than Eddie is. “Then, I think we’re just gonna have to try and get some sleep.”

Richie can’t sleep.

Which, yeah, fucking obviously he can’t sleep.

Because there was the godawful red-eye flight and the hour-and-something drive in his rental and the _oh so lovely_ highlight reel of all his deepest most repressed childhood memories slamming into his brain like a fucking reverse lobotomy and then, of course, _that_ absolute shitstorm of a reunion dinner right smack in the middle of it.

Christ, between that and the prospect of what fun new horrors are gonna be awaiting them all in the morning, it would have been a goddamn miracle if Richie managed to close his eyes for more than three seconds at a time before they flew wide open, leaving him staring up at the shitty outdated popcorn ceilings of the Derry Town House with his heart doing its damn best to bust its way out through his ribcage.

God. Honestly?

 _Fuck_ Derry.

Like, obviously fuck the child-eating murder clown, yeah, but that’s not even what Richie means. Fuck the rest of it, too. Fuck that freaky huge standpipe and the old Kitchener Ironworks and _especially_ every creepy inch of the Derry Town House. Fuck the canal and that musty secondhand shop and the stuffy little pharmacy, fuck the over-the-top town fair that everyone loses their goddamn minds over. Fuck all of it.

The whole population of Derry can blow themselves. What the hell does Richie care about them, anyway? What’s he care? They’re just a bunch of bible-thumping right-wing morons who somehow missed the memo that they do not, in fact, live in fucking Alabama and none of whom ever gave a _sliver_ of a rat’s ass what happened to him or _any_ of the other kids in town. Yeah, Richie may not remember everything, he may not remember the _big_ things, but he remembers that. They’ve all got their heads shoved so far up their own asses that they didn’t even _notice_ — or just plain old didn’t give a shit — when a bunch of little kids started getting picked off by the monster living under all their noses. Or, shit, even the _non-_ supernatural crap. Like any of them ever batted an eye when Bowers beat the piss out of anyone who so much as _looked_ at him wrong, or when little thirteen-year-old Beverly Marsh showed up to school with bruises ringing her wrists, or any of the other fucked up non-clown-related shit that went down around here on a day-to-day fucking basis.

And now the clown’s at it again, and the whole of Derry is going right back to the status quo of shoving their heads in the sand.

Yeah. Fuck this place.

Pretty much as soon as Eddie’s Uber disappeared around the darkened end of the road outside the Jade of Orient, Richie had already made up his mind that he wasn’t sticking around.

Did he feel like the world’s biggest asshole for leaving the rest of them in the lurch while he ran off to the other side of the country? Absolutely. Of course he did. He _was_ the world’s biggest asshole for it.

Was that gonna stop him? Fucking _nope._

Except—

Well, except he hadn’t even gotten as far as throwing his bag in the trunk of his rental by the time Mike came sprinting up the stairs at the Derry Town House, bringing with him an update on the latest fun new development in the Losers’ Grand Reunion Tour of Derry.

Really. As if Richie needed proof that the actual fucking horror movie monster wasn’t the only danger in this shithole town.

But _Bowers?_

Henry Bowers, the guy Richie had very nearly successfully closed off into that little box at the back of his brain with the big old duct tape label over the top reading REPRESS THIS SHIT in big black Sharpie. Bowers, whom Richie had safely assumed was _fucking dead_ and had been for the last twenty-seven years, because he just straight up didn’t remember the news breaking that summer about a half-alive sixteen-year-old kid who was dragged out of the Kenduskeag and then promptly dragged off to some state asylum for the criminally insane. Bowers, who Richie _bets_ would have had the exact same qualms about killing a nine-year-old as the fucking clown would have had: that is, literally none.

And, well, it’s one thing to justify running away from five of the only real friends you ever had in your miserable life, leaving them behind to go fight an incomprehensible evil from your worst goddamn nightmares while you’re driving off into the sunset— though, in retrospect, Richie’s not even sure he would have made it more than a mile out of Derry before the guilt chewed up his insides and rotted his brain enough to get him to pull a u-ie on the fucking highway, but— _still._ That would’ve been one thing.

It’s another thing when you’re leaving behind _six_ of your friends, and one of those friends was definitely your best friend and is also someone you… might have had some thoughts about when you were kids, thoughts that may or may not still be there now, thoughts that you would rather not delve into or ever think about ever ever ever again, thank you very goddamn much.

And then it’s a whole other ball game _entirely_ when said friend has his nine-year-old kid with him.

In a town with a rampaging child-eating murder clown.

And he just got stabbed.

_Fuck._

Richie rolls over in the hotel bed, reaches for his cell phone, and the blurry numbers flaring on his screen tell him that it’s 2:17.

_Fuuuuuuuuuuck._

About half an hour ago, everyone filed out of Eddie’s room and headed for their own rooms — and that does mean everyone, including Mike, who they all collectively bullied into _not_ driving home alone at this hour and who right about now should be two floors up and three doors over on the couch in Bill’s room. So all seven Losers, plus one Loser Junior, are currently under this roof trying to get some sleep.

Richie’s been lying here, not sleeping, for a grand total of twenty-two minutes.

Christ, this place is quiet. Richie can hear the rustle of fabric when he sits up in the bed and shoves the duvet off his legs. He can hear the wind whistling through ancient wooden walls and poorly insulated windows. He can hear a faint cooing sound in the distance that he’s… pretty sure is an owl, if he remembers what owls sound like. He can hear the radiator in the corner of his room sputtering out heat in little irregular bursts.

It’s like a set pulled right out of the _fucking_ Shining.

The next ten minutes come and go, and when they do, they find Richie Tozier shuffling out of his creepy rented room and along the equally creepy hallway in the t-shirt he slept in (or meant to sleep in — it’s the thought that counts) and a spare pair of sweatpants from his duffel.

“This is dumb,” he murmurs to himself, so quiet it barely even makes it to his own ears. “This is _so_ fuckin’ dumb, man.”

Eddie’s probably already asleep, and hell if Richie’s gonna knock on the door and risk waking him or the kid up. He’s too chickenshit to do that and he knows it. All he’ll probably do is walk right past Eddie’s door, reassure himself with the quiet of the hallway and the fact that Pennywise the Fuckface Clown has not, in fact, absconded with Eddie’s tiny adorable kid, and then he’ll keep walking right to the other end of the hall, head back down the other staircase, and retreat to his room to lie in a sleepless silence for the next six or seven hours. So what if he can’t sleep? So what if that old fear from a time he thought he fucking forgot is gripping him by the throat and increasing pressure with every second he spends in Derry? So what?

He’s gonna bottle that shit up like a goddamn adult, that’s what.

Of course, the last thing he expects while he’s on his ill-advised late night excursion through the Derry Town House halls is to have witnesses.

 _(Unless a couple of little twin girls show up at the end of the hall asking you to play with ‘em— and goddammit, now that you thought that it’s totally gonna happen,_ It’s _gonna make it happen you fucking piece-of-shit moron—)_

But what he _really_ doesn’t expect to find, as he turns the corner and lands himself just a few steps from the door to Eddie’s room—

— is Beverly Marsh.

She’d been walking toward Eddie’s door, too, but from the opposite direction, and she stops dead in her tracks, not five feet away from Richie. All her make-up’s gone, and her wide eyes are centered on Richie as her pale lips fall open in a little o.

“Richie,” she breathes. “What are you…?”

Correction: _Most_ of her make-up’s gone. There’s a streak of brownish something next to her right eye that she must have missed when she washed her face. There is _also_ a pretty ugly bruise on the opposite cheekbone. Did Richie miss that before? Is she that good at covering shit like that up?

(Or, he wonders with a little pang, has she _gotten_ that good at covering shit like that up?)

He stands there like a dumbass for a solid two or three seconds before he recovers, and then he shrugs, leaning sideways against the wall.

“Doing here? Little ol’ me? Oh, just… y’know, taking a stroll, appreciating the scenery.”

Bev recovers from the shock of no longer being alone even more quickly than he does, which if he remembers is pretty par for the course for Beverly Marsh. She nods slowly, easily and instantly falling into that exact same thing she used to do when they were kids, where she would make a real show of playing along with him, her eyes narrowed and the faintest bit of a smile on her face. “The scenery, yeah, of course.”

“Yep. Not every day you get to explore scenic Bumfuck Nowhere, Maine, _Mizz Marsh.”_

The smile grows enough that her teeth show. “And can I ask why you brought along a baseball bat for your scenic midnight stroll, _Mistuh Tozier?”_

Hm. Right.

Richie sighs, taking his hands away from behind his back where he had been not-so-discreetly hiding the bat in question: thirty-two inches of aluminum or whatever the fuck bats are made of these days, courtesy of the sporting goods shop off I-95 in Bangor.

“What, this old thing?” he asks, giving it a little flourish.

Bev nods. Some of the jokey mischief fades from her eyes, which seem to have… caught, on the bat, following its slow lazy movements.

“Would you believe I bought this before we even remembered the fuckin’ clown?” Richie asks her, because it’s the truth. “Before I even got back to Derry. Got off the highway and drove by this big ass sports shop and I thought, _pull over._ Even though I’ve never set foot in a _sporting goods_ store in my entire life, obviously.” He gestures at himself from head to toe with his free hand, leaning on the baseball bat with the other like it’s a cane. “And I saw the metal bats and I was like, I need it. I don’t know why I need it, but I need it. And _did_ you know—” he raises one finger like he’s imparting sagely advice— “that metal baseball bats cost like two hundred bucks? Two hundred bucks for a fat metal stick. Are you serious? I mean, come on.”

He raises his eyebrows, eyes wide as if to say, _Fucked up, isn’t it?_

Bev nods again, but apparently not to commiserate on the ridiculous price of sporting goods. She brings a hand up to her mouth — there are bruises there, too, Richie notices, ringing her wrists like when she was a kid, and he squashes down the need to ask about it, just like he always did back then — and then she drops it.

“You remembered.”

Richie blows a raspberry. “Yeah, fucking _apparently.”_

There’s a creak from behind him then, a subtle squeak of old hardwood underfoot, but _fuck,_ Richie’s so wired for some scary shit to go down here that it’s plenty to send his heart leaping up into his throat.

He pivots, tossing the baseball bat up and then catching it like he’s in the goddamn MLB, already raring to swing. He’ll twirl it around and everything before he smacks Pennywise in the teeth with two hundred dollars of fucking aluminum alloy, watch him. _Welcome to the Losers’ Club, asshole—!_

“Uh,” Stanley says, pausing at the top of the staircase from which Richie had just come.

“Oh. It’s Stan,” Richie says, acting like he hadn’t just had the shit scared out of him by a perpetually geriatric accountant from Georgia. He drops out of what is probably a _very_ unprofessional baseball player stance, once again leaning all his weight on the bat like it’s a cane. “Well, heya, Stanley. Welcome to the late night rendezvous outside Eddie’s door, glad you could make it.”

Stan looks at him, brow furrowed, then at Bev. “Right,” he says, then points with his thumb over his shoulder. “I’m just gonna…”

“We scared him off that quick, Ringwald,” Richie says, _tsk_ -ing and shaking his head. “Me thinks that’s a new record.”

Before Stan can answer, though, or tell Richie to fuck off, their impromptu party of three once again unexpectedly grows by one.

Richie looks over his shoulder just in time to see new-and-improved tall-dark-and-shredded Ben Hanscom making his way down the staircase on the other end of the hall, and just like Stanley, he stops short as soon as he sees them all standing there. Like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be, like he’s a little kid with his hand stuck in the cookie jar.

Bev turns to see him, too, and she sighs, shoulders sagging.

“We were all too worried about them to sleep, weren’t we?” she asks, turning to look at each of them in turn, and Richie glances in Stan’s direction just in time to see him clenching his jaw and giving a resigned sort of nod.

Ben silently pads across the carpet in his socks — they’re _all_ just in their socks, actually, now that Richie’s thought to look — and he shrugs, his cheeks tinged pink. And how the fuck he manages to look like a sheepish little kid when he looks like _that,_ like he’s just stepped out of a fuckin’ GQ magazine, Richie has no idea. It’s almost spooky.

“It goes after kids,” Ben says, like that’s all that needs saying. And maybe it is.

Bev just nods. Behind Richie, Stan sighs and probably fucking nods, too.

Richie groans and throws his head back. “Alright, alright, _fine,_ who’s gonna call Mikey and Big Bill down here, huh? Might as well make it a party while we’re at it.”

He’s only half joking, and sure enough, hardly another second passes before Ben’s got his phone out.

Richie pulls his out, too, because _let’s be real, folks,_ he thinks, _this is probably a better option than knocking on the door and scaring the bejesus out of him, and I am not looking to get an aspirator unloaded in my eyes tonight._

Eddie picks up halfway through the first ring, and from the sound of his voice it does _not_ sound like Richie succeeded in not scaring him.

“What? What happened? Who—?”

“Howdy, Eds,” Richie cuts in, as casual as he can possibly manage. “You up?”

“Am I—?” Eddie asks, half whispering. “No, I’m fast asleep, Richie. This is my sleep talking voice.”

“Oh, good!” Richie says, then leans slightly away from his phone, still carefully close enough that Eddie can hear him through the receiver. “Guys, good news, he’s incapacitated. Now we can all go in and raid his room’s mini-fridge and foot him the bill, whaddya say?”

“Huh? Rich, who’re you talking to?”

Richie sighs, pushing his glasses up to rub at the bridge of his nose. “We’re outside your room, man. Care to open up?”

“You’re—? Right _now?_ Fuck, hold on.”

The connection cuts away with a click, and two seconds later there’s the shifting clunk of the hotel door’s deadbolt unlocking, then the chain, and then the door opens wide to leave Eddie, standing there wide-eyed and staring at all of them.

Ben tucks his own phone away, too. “So Mike and Bill are on their way down. Apparently they’ve been debating back and forth on whether to come down here for the last twenty minutes anyway.”

“What? Why?” Eddie asks, his face all pinched and confused. “What’s going on?”

“Well, isn’t that obvious?” Richie asks, smiling sweetly and batting his eyes as he leans forward on his baseball bat cane. “We’re having a _slumber party.”_

In the middle of the night, Frannie wakes up.

Except she doesn’t. Not really. She’s already standing when she opens her eyes and sees nothing but an endless black night sky in all directions — _including_ down, because she checks there, too, and beneath her feet is nothing but black, black, black, just like everything around her. No sun, no moon, no stars.

She’s still in her pajamas.

She thinks she might be dreaming.

It’s weird, though, because she’s not scared. She thought she would be. She was really scared before she went to sleep, and she was still a little scared when she finally got into the bed and _went_ to sleep, so it had only made sense to her that she should also be scared _while_ she’s asleep. At the very least, she kind of assumed she’d have some really bad nightmares like she always does after scary movies at Charlotte’s house.

Instead, even though it’s dark, she just feels… normal. Content, even. Definitely safe.

She squints, and somewhere up ahead in the great wide nothingness she thinks she can see the dull half-formed shape of a school desk, and she makes her way toward it until it’s close enough that she can see it better.

Sure enough, it’s a desk. One of those old wooden ones with the seat attached like the ones in her social studies class.

Frannie gets in the seat. She doesn’t see any reason not to.

MAKING YOURSELF COMFORTABLE, I SEE.

The voice doesn’t scare her either, even though it kind of comes out of nowhere. It’s not especially deep or especially high-pitched, mostly because it doesn’t seem to have a sound at all. Like it’s not coming from the big black nothing all around her but from _inside_ somehow, inside her brain and reverberating out and skipping right past her ears.

Slowly, from out of the black above her, something comes swimming into view.

It’s a sea turtle, so huge that she can’t see the other end of its shell or where its tail should be, so huge that it has to tilt forward and lower its head all the way down to the not-ground in order to see her. One gigantic eyeball that Frannie thinks might be as big as a school bus hovers in front of her desk, blinking, big and black and shiny, so close she feels like if she stretched across the desk on her stomach she could reach out and touch it.

She doesn’t, though. She thinks it would probably be pretty rude if she did.

HELLO.

“Hi,” Frannie says, because again, she can’t see any reason not to. “Who’re you?”

THE TURTLE.

 _“The_ turtle, or _a_ turtle?”

THE TURTLE, the turtle repeats. I MADE THE WHOLE UNIVERSE.

“Really?”

REALLY, REALLY. PLEASE DON’T BLAME ME FOR IT, THOUGH. I HAD AN AWFUL BELLYACHE.

Frannie wrinkles her nose. That’s a _lot_ of stuff to throw up, and somehow she knows that’s what the turtle means without having to ask. “You made the whole universe ‘cause of a bellyache?”

The turtle’s great big head dips down in a silent nod.

“Did you feel better after?”

Again, the turtle nods once. I HAD BEEN THE ONLY THING IN EXISTENCE FOR A VERY, VERY LONG TIME. IT WAS NICE TO HAVE SOMETHING ELSE AROUND FOR A CHANGE.

“I bet,” Frannie says. “So you’re kind of like a god, I guess?”

I GUESS. IN A WAY.

“Okay,” Frannie says, and she folds her arms on the desk and drops her cheek on top of them, kicking her feet back and forth under the chair. “So you’re really old and big and important, right? And you, like… know a lot of stuff?”

I DO KNOW A LOT OF STUFF, YES.

“Okay, well, maybe you can help me and my dad out, then. There’s some kind of scary movie monster in the town he grew up in,” Frannie tells the turtle. “That’s where I’m at now, I think. Where I’m sleeping and having this weird dream. It’s a place called Derry, Maine, and the monster here keeps killing a bunch of kids and scaring me and my dad and all my dad’s friends. And I think it made some guy try to kill us in his car, or it made us _see_ some guy trying to kill us in his car, but either way, it was really, _really_ scary, and my dad got hurt, and—”

I ALREADY KNOW.

“Oh! Good,” Frannie says, because that _is_ good. “So you know about the monster, then? Like what it is and how it’s killing a bunch of kids and how it makes people see the things they’re afraid of?”

MM-HMM.

“So how do we get rid of it?”

The only answer to that is a resounding silence, a silence that feels deeper than the silence that came before it. It’s a silence that _means_ something, and Frannie can’t keep the disappointment from her voice.

“You don’t _know?”_ she whines, sitting up. “But you’re _the_ turtle! You made the whole universe! You’re older than anybody I’ve ever met! How can you not know how to get rid of one stupid monster?”

THIS PARTICULAR MONSTER IS OLDER THAN ANYONE YOU’VE EVER MET, TOO.

“Including you?”

Again, silence.

“Yeah,” Frannie huffs, leaning back against the seat and crossing her arms, and the turtle’s great big bluish eyelids come down over its eye in a slow blink. “That’s what I thought.”

LOOK, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU, KID. WHY DO YOU THINK I BROUGHT YOU HERE?

Frannie raises an eyebrow and shrugs. How the heck is she supposed to know why the turtle brought her here? Until now she didn’t even know the turtle _did_ bring her here at all. Isn’t this just a really weird dream?

“I don’t know.”

I DON’T EITHER. I’M THROWING THINGS AT A WALL AND SEEING WHAT STICKS.

“How come?”

If the turtle had shoulders to shrug with, Frannie thinks that’s what the turtle would be doing right now. YOU START MESSING WITH COSMOLOGICAL SHIT LIKE THIS AND YOU KIND OF HAVE TO THROW AWAY THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL.

Frannie squints at the turtle. “You know, my dad said something like that when he was trying to build my new dresser, but the only reason he said that is ‘cause he accidentally threw the manual in the trash, and my mom already took the trash out and he couldn’t find the manual online anywhere.”

Somehow, she thinks the turtle’s big black shiny eye manages to look embarrassed. Or maybe she can just tell, maybe it’s putting its moods out into this black nothingness the same way it’s putting its voice in her brain.

 _“Did_ you lose the manual?”

THERE WAS NEVER A MANUAL TO BEGIN WITH, the turtle answers. IT’S A METAPHOR.

“Hm. Not a very good one, I think,” Frannie says. “Maybe you should’ve thrown up a manual when you threw up the whole universe. _That_ would’ve been the smart thing to do.”

The turtle hums, and it’s such a deep sound that it vibrates through the desk and all the way up her bones. She’s not sure if the turtle humming in thought or, maybe, if that deep rumbly sound is supposed to be some kind of laugh.

YOU KNOW, the turtle says, MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE.

HINDSIGHT’S A BITCH SOMETIMES.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, mr. king wrote [some banger lines](https://66.media.tumblr.com/f629e6e0bfa6fd6d97bdae930d80145d/a5329d085d33c538-cd/s640x960/4655205334a5d119d37d8643c3f0500562b8f32e.jpg) every so often (but i guess the kid disagrees, what are you gonna do)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: god i'm so swamped with school work i don't have time for anything else :(  
> also me: posts 60k worth of fic in like, two weeks
> 
> anyway y'all ready for like, a bunch of character bonding and an itsy bitsy bit of plot progression? i have a lot of loser bonding to make up for since that chinese restaurant scene went to shit so fast lmao
> 
>  **warnings for this chapter:** memory loss (duh), some symptoms of ptsd, and a discussion about parental abuse

“So,” Richie whispers. “Let’s place our bets now, shall we?”

Richie’s slouching up against the side of Eddie’s bed frame, long legs stretched out in front of him, his socked toes dangerously close to jabbing into Ben’s side where the big guy’s lying passed out on top of several layers of _disgusting_ hotel bed duvets — but, whatever, fuck it, Eddie was way too exhausted to police the way a bunch of grown men decided to finally crash for the night, especially when they’re all here, in this hotel room instead of their own, on the floor and the pull-out sofa instead of warm and comfortable in their own hotel beds, because of _him._

He shoves the thought away. On Ben’s other side, Mike makes a weird noise in his sleep and rolls over, curling his absurdly huge body around one of those giant hotel pillows. 

Eddie waits, and Richie doesn’t elaborate, so he slowly shifts around on the bed — careful to avoid jostling the mattress — until he’s lying on his side so that Richie’s head is somewhere right in front of his stomach. He can see Richie’s profile in the barely-there ruddy glow from the alarm clock on the nightstand, the silhouette of his hair. No glasses, though. Those are on the floor beside him.

How many nights did Eddie spend like this as a kid, he wonders? With Richie, with any of them, with _all_ of them at once like this?

He can’t remember, but he thinks he’s starting to.

“Bets?” Eddie asks, also at a whisper.

Richie nods; Eddie can see it. “Who in this room d’ya think grew up to be the most _obnoxious_ snorer, Eds?”

Eddie smirks, stuffing his hand under the pillow under his head. Behind his back, Fran’s fast asleep and starfished across as much of the King sized mattress as she can possibly take up. The heel of her foot is pressed into the back of his knee, but it’s less uncomfortable than it is reassuring, a reminder that she’s here and she’s… well. Relatively safe. As safe as she’s gonna get in Derry. On Fran’s other side, Bev’s sleeping peacefully and soundlessly with her back to them. If anything comes through the door — whether it be the clown or another fucking escaped asylum convict or anything in between — it’ll have all seven of them to contend with, and despite the fact that he’s still in fucking _Derry,_ Eddie somehow feels safer than he ever has, surrounded by all of them. All seven Losers under one roof, all together in one room.

But none of them has started snoring yet.

He thinks for a second, then ventures, “Bill?”

“It’s _gotta_ be, right?” Richie agrees, slumping a little more against the bed frame. “That or Stan the Man. Actually— no, you know what, forget Bill. My money’s _so_ on Stan.”

From the other side of the room on the sofa bed, Stanley mutters:

“Go the _fuck_ to bed, Tweedle Dee.”

Richie laughs so quietly that Eddie wouldn’t have even been able to hear it if they weren’t less than two feet apart, and Eddie can’t help laughing a bit, too, before he stage whispers, “Sorry, Stan.”

This time, when Richie speaks, he’s careful to keep his voice so low that only Eddie can hear.

“That make you Tweedle Dum, Eds?”

“Oh, fuck off, if one of us is Tweedle Dum, it’s you.”

“Tweedle Dingus.”

“Tweedle Dipshit.”

Richie’s answering laugh is barely a huff of breath, but Eddie sees it in the shaking of his shoulders, the way he tips his head back against the mattress.

Yeah, Eddie thinks, this is… _really_ familiar. Twenty-seven years or so removed, but familiar. Like muscle memory. And again Eddie finds himself thinking of late nights in his old room at his old house, of a flashlight under a blanket tent, of too many limbs fighting for space, of comic books and hushed voices and stifled laughter and stolen snacks.

 _I think Richie might have been my best friend,_ he’d told Frannie, when those memories were barely more than a blip at the edge of his mental radar, just flashes, like those single frames that get slotted into a movie and only come up long enough to burn their way into your subconscious.

Now it’s starting to clear up. The fog is dissipating more and more, and so many of those memories are no longer just flashes but a whole play-by-play rerun in his head.

There’s no _might have been_ about it. There’s no _I think,_ not anymore.

Richie was his best friend. Full stop.

And it’s funny — well, not _funny_ funny, but weird funny — how much he _feels_ it. Because most of the time, or most of the time for the past several years anyway, Eddie’s always felt like there’s been a sort of… _block,_ separating him from about ninety-nine percent of his emotions. A thick layer of insulated padding that prevents him from fully _feeling_ things the way people are supposed to.

There’s something about the early hours of the morning that tends to peel that insulation back, though, layer by layer, and what’s underneath is left feeling flayed apart and exposed and raw. Between the late hour and the quiet stillness of the room, between the exhaustion and the fear, between the relentless _déjà vu_ of the past twelve-ish hours and the slow dawning realization that he’s been missing something, something crucial, something that’s part of _himself_ for so many years…

Christ, it fucking _hurts._

Eddie gulps, and he whispers, “Why do you think we forgot everything, Rich?”

“Fuck if I know,” Richie huffs, equally quiet. “Good ol’ fashioned repression?”

Eddie doesn’t quite say _no,_ but he gives a vague little hum that he thinks Richie can probably interpret just fine. And he does, if the answering hum is anything to go by. A _no, actually, I don’t think that’s it,_ without having to say it aloud. A _nah, you’re right, me neither,_ in response. Hell, he doesn’t even think the humming was necessary to begin with; somehow he knows Richie already agreed with him.

Because the fact is, it _can’t_ be good old fashioned repression, can it? Because if repression was all it was, then sure, he’d get it if they all forgot the clown, and the blood in Bev’s bathroom, and the rotting diseased— _thing,_ chasing him out of the yard on Neibolt Street. Obviously. He’d get it if they forgot nearly all of Derry even, because God knows this whole town is a shitshow on the best of days, clown or no clown.

All of that, he’d get. He’d understand his brain at fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen deciding, _Hey, you know what? He doesn’t need this on file, let’s just chuck the whole thing, start from scratch._

But forgetting Richie? Forgetting Bev and Stan and Bill and Ben and Mike? What the hell kind of purpose could that have served?

“So,” Richie whispers again, pulling Eddie from his thoughts. “What _has_ Eddie Spaghetti been up to the last… twenty-some-odd years, hm?”

Eddie gulps again. That question brings to mind all the standard answers. Where he went to school, what he ended up doing with his life, where he lives. But all of that he already told them at dinner, well before Richie started ripping into him about his wife and Ben told them all about his terrible track coach and Mike quietly nudged Eddie from the table and said, _Hey, can I talk to you for a second,_ and everything went to shit faster than—

He scrunches his eyes shut, shoves that thought well away. It’s fucking three in the morning, he doesn’t need to be thinking about that shit.

“Already told you,” Eddie answers.

“Yeah, the Cliff Notes.”

“Not much more than the Cliff Notes, dude,” Eddie tells him. “My life’s pretty boring, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Exactly. _Perfect_ bedtime story material, if you ask me.”

“Fuck off,” Eddie whispers, but there’s no heat in it. “What about you, huh?”

Richie blows out a slow breath, tosses his hands up. “Dunno. Not much to tell either, man. Moved to L.A. straight out of high school,” he says, which he already told them at dinner, too. “Shared a shitty little studio apartment for, like, _ever._ Disappointed the hell outta Mags n’ Went, not going to college. Disappointed ‘em even more when I decided to go back and major in fuckin’ theater.”

The silence hangs for a second, and Eddie can’t help asking, “Are they…?”

“Dad is,” Richie answers without him having to finish the sentence. “He’s in a retirement home in Connecticut, still does a little work here and there. Mom passed a couple years ago.”

Huh. Eddie is… more upset than he thought he’d be, hearing about the passing of a woman he hasn’t seen in literal decades. He could have assumed Richie’s parents weren’t both still alive and well, statistically — especially given that neither of _his_ parents are alive, and he’s fairly certain that the members of the Losers Club with living parents are far outnumbered by those without — but it’s not quite the same. There was always such a big difference between Maggie Tozier and Sonia Kaspbrak, from what he remembers. Fucking leagues, though Eddie’s still not sure how to articulate how or why, or if he even wants to articulate it.

All he knows is that when he thinks of Mrs. Tozier, he automatically thinks of bemused smiles and ruffled hair and, oddly, the smell of blueberry pancakes. Warmth.

His hand’s barely a few inches from Richie anyway, so he reaches across that scant distance and clumsily squeezes Richie’s shoulder. “Sorry, Rich.”

Richie takes a quiet breath. His shoulders move with it, quick on the way up and slow on the way down.

“Thanks, man.”

Again, the silence hangs for a bit. It’s not uncomfortable, and neither is Eddie’s hand on Richie’s shoulder, so he leaves it there. He knows Richie would tell him to fuck off if he wanted him to.

The rest of Richie’s missing twenty-seven years isn’t really anything Eddie needs to ask about, because that is also something they got to hear at dinner, the fact that he hopped from shitty job to shitty job in L.A., worked a few comedy clubs, and finally managed to catch the attention of some big shot talent recruiters. He’s basically famous, though not as famous as Bev and definitely not as famous as Bill, but he’s toured all over the fucking country to just— do what he always does, make people laugh. Only difference is that now he does it on a bigass stage with a microphone in hand and he gets _paid_ for it.

Toured in New York, too. A few times, apparently.

Eddie wonders, for what is not even _close_ to the first time today, if they might have crossed paths in the city before. Would Eddie have recognized him, then? Would they have remembered everything when they saw each other? Or would they have gone on their merry clueless ways without so much as a second glance?

And Eddie doesn’t know why — again, maybe it’s that weird nebulous quality of the middle of the night, peeling back all that insulated padding he’s so used to having at his defense — but thinking about it now just makes him so fucking _sad._

Actually, no, you know what? Fuck that.

Eddie’s not just sad, he realizes. That’s not even the half of it.

He’s goddamn pissed off.

He’s pissed off that he forgot the only real friends he ever had, he’s pissed off at how pissed off thirteen-year-old him would be if he could see him now, he’s pissed off at the fact that he let his entire life go by all _wrong,_ married to a person that was never right for him, working a job that never quite fit, letting time slide underneath him like a too-fast treadmill spinning away under his feet.

He takes his hand away from Richie’s shoulder and— well, there’s no other way to put it. He curls in on himself. Brings up the defenses.

Then, unsure why he’s saying it at all, Eddie quietly admits, “I’m divorcing my wife.”

Richie doesn’t say anything to that at first. Instead he rolls his head against the mattress until he’s sort of facing Eddie, at least peripherally, but it’s still too dark to make out what kind of look he’s giving.

“I haven’t… told anyone that yet,” Eddie adds, even quieter. “I mean, other than Frannie. And Myra, obviously.”

“Yeah? How’d she take it?”

Eddie almost laughs. He still has yet to open his texts, and he does not intend to. That’s gonna be a problem for tomorrow Eddie, because today Eddie got stabbed, and he’s got plenty to deal with already, fucking thanks.

He answers, “I had my phone turned off from the time I got here until I had to call Mike. How do you think she took it?”

“Oof.”

“Yeah.”

“How ‘bout the kid?”

Eddie opens his mouth, then shuts it. Again he brings his focus to the foot that’s digging into the back of his knee, and he thinks of the car ride up, and how apparently Fran’s best friend is so much happier now that her own parents are no longer together, and how she’d said _I’m sure, Dad, jeez, I’m nine and a half, not five,_ and how he still hasn’t been able to shut off the voice in his head saying _but what if she’s not as okay with it as she’s pretending to be,_ and Jesus Christ, how can something as mundane as a _divorce_ be taking up any space in his brain at all right now, in the wake of everything else that’s happened today? How does he have the fucking _capacity_ to be anxious over this anymore?

“… She took it pretty well,” Eddie finally answers. “Bizarrely well, actually.”

“Not surprised. The tiny badass.”

“No kidding,” Eddie agrees. “She sprayed Bowers in the face with my inhaler like it was a can of mace.”

“I know, man, she _regaled_ us with the whole story,” Richie says. He pauses for a beat, then adds, “Didn’t know inhalers could do that, though.”

“I… don’t think they can,” Eddie whispers, because he’s been thinking about that ever since it happened. He’d never have expected any real outcome from spraying an inhaler in someone’s face, much less for it to have the effect it _did,_ Bowers screaming his head off and his eyes searing red and— Eddie shakes his head. “Not normally, anyway.”

“Mm. Sounds like she saved your asses with it, though.”

“Yeah. Yeah, she kinda did, man.”

“Itty bitty little badass.”

Eddie huffs. “Yeah, do me a favor and don’t tell her that. I think… Christ, dude, it’s like she stood up to Bowers once and now she’s done a total one-eighty. You heard her earlier, telling everyone about it like it was just a crazy story. I know she’s still scared—”

“— who fuckin’ wouldn’t be—”

“— but now I think it’s less… so scared she can’t even think about it, and more, like, this is a really scary thing but now it’s a really scary thing that can be… fought back against, I guess. You know?”

“I mean, is that a bad thing?”

“Is it a bad thing that my nine-year-old daughter might be willing to fight a monster that’s killed nine kids in the past month?”

Richie hesitates for a second, then tilts his head. _Fair,_ that head tilt says.

“She’s—” Eddie breaks off, tightens his grip on the underside of the pillow beneath his head. “God, she’s _literally_ the only good thing that came out of the last twenty-seven years, man.”

“Yeah? The only thing?”

“Yeah, dude, I didn’t— I didn’t really _do_ anything after I left Derry?” Eddie explains, and it’s something of a struggle to keep his voice level, but he manages anyway. The very last thing he wants to do right now is wake anyone, but Richie’s awake, and now that Eddie’s started spilling his guts he feels like he can’t fucking stop. “It’s like I just coasted along all that time and— and kept letting everything _happen_ to me instead of making things happen the way I wanted, and I forgot all about you guys and the clown and what we did, and I forgot how to be _brave_ and I just—”

He breaks off again, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth for a second. And Richie, of course, takes that as an opportunity to interject.

“The fuck you mean, you forgot how to be brave, man?”

“I don’t— I don’t _know,_ dude, fuck, maybe I never knew how to be brave in the first place, but—”

“Uh, bullshit? Dude, three hours ago you stabbed a guy with a knife you pulled out of your own _body,”_ Richie reminds him, as if the low throbbing just below and to the left of his collarbone isn’t enough of a reminder. “You helped fight a killer clown when you were fuckin’ thirteen and you _won,_ Eds.”

Eddie lets that sentence hang there for a second, trying to really make it sink in, and then he whispers, “I don’t know. That was like, the heat of the moment or whatever, and aside from that? I can’t think of a single time in the last three fucking decades that I did anything even close to brave. I can’t remember doing anything that felt _right,_ but she’s… She’s the exception, you know? She’s the one good thing I managed to squeeze out of that twenty-seven years. The one good thing.”

And she is. There’s no doubt in his mind about that, never has been. She’s _good,_ through some innate quality of her own rather than anything that has to do with him or with Myra, some incredible magic thing that’s just a part of who she is, something that sprung up in her all on its own.

“Rich, if anything happens to her, I don’t—”

“Hey,” Richie cuts in, somehow authoritative despite still being so, so quiet. Quieter than anyone in their right mind would ever expect from Richie Tozier. “Nothing’s gonna happen to her. That’s what the bat’s for, remember?”

There’s a flicker out of the corner of Eddie’s eye, a shadow passing across the faint slats of moonlight showing through the blinds directly ahead, and Eddie realizes it’s because Richie lifted up his baseball bat and gave it a little demonstrative flourish before laying it back down, soundlessly, across his lap.

“Hell if any of us are gonna let anything get near her,” Richie adds with another one of those full body shrugs he does, so exaggerated that Eddie has no problem seeing it in the low light. “And hey, so you got one good thing out of the last twenty-something years, right? That’s not too bad if you ask me.”

The weight in his chest doesn’t lift, but that does coax half a smile out of him. He accepts the change of subject gratefully and without comment. God knows they needed it.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, dude. You got a _kid._ And a pretty damn cool one, too. By that measure alone, you’re already doing a hell of a lot better than any of the rest of us, that’s for fuckin’ sure,” Richie says. “Except for Stanley, I guess. Smug prick.”

Eddie huffs a laugh. “What about Bill?”

“What _about_ Bill?”

“He’s…” Eddie trails off, muddling around in his brain for the right word, and eventually settles with, “… successful?”

Richie quietly scoffs. “We’re all kinda successful, Eds. Don’t know if it slipped your notice, but it _kinda_ doesn’t mean shit.”

“But he’s married to a movie star. Like,” Eddie’s eyes narrow as he thinks, “like an _actual_ movie star.”

Richie pauses for a beat, then concedes, “Yeah, okay, you got me there. I’ll give you that. So you’re doing a hell of a lot better than the rest of us, except for Stan and Bill.”

“What about you?”

Richie snorts a laugh but doesn’t say anything else.

“But what about—?” Eddie starts to ask, then mentally backpedals, and then decides to go ahead and ask anyway. Fuck it. It’s the middle of the night, and they’re the only ones awake, and Richie’s over here implying that all those years he spent being a big shot comedian in L.A. and touring the whole goddamn country somehow didn’t amount to anything, and— “I mean, you have a girlfriend, don’t you?”

It’s a reasonable question, he thinks, because if _he_ were Richie’s girlfriend, he’d be pretty pissed at all this griping about how his entire life supposedly sucks worse than Eddie’s.

It is _totally_ a reasonable question.

You wouldn’t know it from Richie’s response, though.

“What in the everloving fuck gave you that idea, man?”

 _Uh._ Eddie has the sense to hold at least that syllable in, because somehow he knows it’d come out entirely too loud and risk waking one of the others, and he literally bites his tongue for a second, rolling it between his teeth before he admits, “I… might have watched some of your show.”

He expects, with that admission, to be mercilessly ribbed to the full extent of Richie’s capability at this time of night with their limited range of decibel usage. He expects Richie to throw his head back again, to smile so wide it’s plenty visible by the alarm clock and the moon alighting his teeth, to say, _Aww, Eds, you watched my show? I didn’t know you were a fan, you want an autograph?_

But none of that happens.

Instead, Richie seems to go tense, those big broad shoulders locking up where they’re still pressed against the bed frame, and he mumbles, “I don’t write my own material, man.”

It takes a second for that information to process in Eddie’s sleep-addled brain, but when it does, Eddie makes the transition from confused and a little bit anxious to goddamn _triumphant_ in half a second flat. He reaches out and slaps Richie in the shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, barely enough to make a sound.

“I knew it,” Eddie whispers, pointing at the back of his head even though Richie can’t see it. “I _fucking_ knew it. I was like, no, that’s crazy, you haven’t known this guy for fucking years, that’s why it sounds so off. Duh, why would you think you should know what his stand-up should sound like? And it was, like, so _off_ and so weird and I thought it must’ve just been me, but it _actually_ wasn’t you. I fucking knew it.”

Eddie’s vaguely sleepy but no less enthusiastic tirade seems to have sapped some of the tension out of Richie; he slouches again, tipping his head back and shrugging with Eddie thinks might be a barely visible smile on his face.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, sounding almost as half-asleep as Eddie is. “I dunno, maybe I’ll write some of my own stuff when all this shit is over. Get my act together.”

“You should.”

“Mm. Been thinking about it. Gonna… fight a fuckin’ nightmare murder clown,” Richie says, pausing halfway through it to try and stifle a yawn. “How hard can a little stand-up be, right?”

“Seriously, Richie. You should.”

Eddie thinks for a second that those words might have come off sounding a little more heartfelt than he meant them to, or maybe they came off sounding _exactly_ as heartfelt as he meant them to, but that’s still too heartfelt for Richie to hear without making fun of him for it. But fuck it. He is, frankly, way too goddamn worn out to give a shit. And then, precisely because he’s so worn out from the emotional onslaught of the day — to say nothing of the _physical_ onslaught of the day and his literal stabbing — and because he’s feeling the sort of things that are only really possible at three in the goddamn morning, and most importantly, because it’s true, Eddie doesn’t hold back what he says next.

He fumbles for Richie’s shoulder again, gripping onto it like a lifeline, like he can physically recreate that fucking unshakeable bond that exists between teenagers when they’re best friends. Like he can transplant whatever they were then into whatever they are now, forty years old and both so lost after decades of coasting through their lives and both every bit as terribly achingly lonely as the rest of the Losers have become.

Eddie bridges the gap, and he doesn’t let go.

“You’re really fucking funny, Richie,” he mumbles, eyes closed. “You know, when you’re actually… being you. You’re probably the funniest person I’ve ever met.”

There’s a long stretch of silence, so long that Eddie very nearly drifts off to the sound of the others’ breathing and Bev’s soft snores.

But then, through the quiet, he hears it.

“Thanks, Eds.”

Eddie lifts his hand to flick Richie in the back of the head, but he’s still smiling, eyes still closed. God, he’d always hated that nickname, hadn’t he? But… well, he’d always sort of liked it, too. He yawns, lets his hand return to where it was even as his grip slackens, and he murmurs, “Don’t call me Eds, dipshit.”

An indeterminate amount of time later, Eddie wakes up with a throbbing pain in his shoulder that makes him feel like he’s been fucking stabbed, which— right, yeah, _lovely,_ that is literally exactly what happened. Zero exaggeration or hyperbole. Awesome. He also wakes up to sunlight staining the inside of his eyelids red, so it must be at least seven or eight in the morning, which is way later than he’s used to waking up and _probably_ explains why he feels so oddly well rested despite the aforementioned stab wound and the rollercoaster of a day he had yesterday.

Also, the bed is empty.

Eddie realizes all of these things, in that order, and the last one sends his heart rate fucking _skyrocketing._

“Shit— fuck—”

His efforts to get out of the bed with an ounce of grace go fucking _swell,_ and he topples off the mattress with his ankles still wrapped in the hotel bed’s weirdly thin waffle blanket and, thank God, catches himself with his right arm braced on the floor instead of his left. It takes an embarrassing amount of fumbling before he’s on his feet, and he frantically looks around the empty room — closed up sofa bed, neatly folded hotel duvets on top, pillows neatly stacked beside it, and _no one here_ — and the panic and adrenaline are _still_ buzzing around his brain right up until his eyes land on the nightstand.

 _Oh,_ he thinks. _Okay._

There’s a bottle of water pinning down a sheet of paper that looks like it’s been ripped out of the back of a book, and scribbled on top of it is a note:

_morning Eddie!_

_everyone's downstairs, breakfast nook next to the bar_

_♡_ _Bev_

She signs her name just like she did when they were kids, Eddie notices, even if her handwriting is a lot smoother now than it was back then; she still signs with a heart, still does the big exaggerated swirly B at the beginning, still connects all three letters in not-quite-cursive.

He flips the paper over even though he knows there won’t be anything there, and then he cracks open the water bottle and starts downing it on his way out the door in his pajamas. And if he speed walks a little because the anxiety’s still got him half convinced he’s gonna walk down there and find everyone _except_ his kid sitting around the breakfast nook, well, fucking sue him.

It’s been a rough twenty-four hours.

Luckily that’s not what happens, though, because he hears Frannie’s voice before he even gets down the stairs.

“… and Katie says that _her_ mom says that it’s supposed to be like Zeus from Hercules, you know, like, a really big muscly guy with a beard that lives in the sky and throws lightning bolts when he gets mad.”

Eddie hears Richie saying something in a voice much deeper than his actual voice, something that sounds suspiciously like _if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball,_ though what that has to do with anything Eddie has no fucking clue. He turns the corner into the room with the breakfast nook to find all seven of them sitting around a table littered with rumpled paper bags and crumb-covered paper sandwich wrappers and paper coffee cups wedged into those recycled paper cup holders. Most of them are engrossed in their own conversations, but Frannie’s sitting between Richie and Stan, turned toward Stan and sipping from a plastic cup of orange juice.

“But God could probably be a giant turtle if he really wanted to be, right?”

Stanley seems to genuinely think that over for a second; he gives one of those agreeing frowns, eyebrows lifting for half a second. “Don’t see why not.”

Frannie takes that with a satisfied nod, returning to her drink, and it’s then that she looks up and sees Eddie approaching the table. She perks up, offering him a smile with a shiny orange juice mustache.

“Hi, Dad! Is your shoulder okay?”

“Pfft. Good as new,” Eddie answers automatically, which is— objectively false, but it’s fine. He’s fine. He nudges Richie aside so he can sit, and Richie moves readily enough, scooting over on the bench style seating to leave the space between him and Frannie open.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, kiddo,” Richie says, sliding one of the coffee cups in front of Eddie without a word about it. “Your dad’s a certified badass when it comes to arm injuries, isn’t that right, Eds?”

“Do not say ‘ass’ in front of my nine-year-old, dumbass,” Eddie mutters into the coffee cup, realizes his mistake, and huffs an annoyed sigh right before Richie barks a laugh and leans over to give him an honest-to-God _noogie._ Like they’re twelve goddamn years old. Eddie half-heartedly swats him away with a yawn, chugs the first half of his coffee without coming up for air, and then adds, “And yes, I am a badass, thank you.”

Because whatever. In the grand scheme of things, he figures the word _ass_ falls pretty low on the list of things Frannie shouldn’t be hearing.

“When it comes to arm injuries,” Richie adds. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.”

“That’s _right,”_ Ben says from across the table, in that tone they all know pretty well by now, the familiar oh-shit-I’m-just-remembering-that-now tone. “You broke your arm the last time, didn’t you?”

“Snapped the fuckin’ thing in half,” Richie adds, and Eddie reaches up and smacks him in the back of the head. _“Ow._ What—?”

Eddie shoots him a wide-eyed _what the fuck is wrong with you_ look, gesturing with a flat hand at Frannie, and Richie looks offended for all of three seconds before it visibly dawns on him. He wrinkles his nose with a look that clearly says, _right, shit, my bad._

“You broke your arm?” Frannie speaks up. “I didn’t know you broke your arm.”

“Yeah, I did, when I was…” Eddie squints, coffee cup halfway raised, “… thirteen?”

“You had that cast on all summer,” Mike says with a nod.

Bev, with her eyes half-focused and a smile tugging at her lips as she rolls her own empty coffee cup against the table top, asks, “Didn’t it say ‘lover’ on it?”

“Ooh, honey, he’s a lover _and_ a fighter,” Richie intones with an overdramatic wistfulness to his voice, reaching into a paper bag on the table and digging a muffin out of it.

“It did, yeah,” Eddie answers Bev. “Greta Bowie wrote ‘loser’ on it so I went home and wrote a big red V over the S.”

“Losers stick together,” Bill murmurs, looking thoughtfully down at the table.

Frannie asks, “Somebody wrote _loser_ on your arm cast? Why?”

“Well,” Eddie says, thinking, “because… I don’t know. I guess we kind of were.”

“But that’s so _mean!”_

“It was, but it’s okay,” Eddie shrugs. “I fixed it.”

“I guess,” she says, half rolling her eyes like she doesn’t quite agree, and she stands up to reach over the table for the bag of muffins. Richie wordlessly tips the bag over to give her easier access, and while she’s tearing a blueberry muffin in half she asks, “How’d it happen?”

Eddie blinks. “Huh?”

“You know, did the…” she trails off, looking around at everybody at the table, “… the monster break it? Your arm.”

Eddie opens his mouth, then shuts it.

His mouth’s gone predictably dry, but— well, it’s certainly a fair question, and it’s one that Eddie immediately knows the answer to. Frannie’s watching him with sympathy and worry in her eyes, but for a second all Eddie can see is the clown in much more vivid detail than he’s been able to in nearly thirty fucking years, the thick globs of white paint, the blood red mouth, the white glove gripping him by the wrist and _laughing,_ always fucking laughing. In his memory the clown towers over him, six, seven, eight feet tall, and for the first time Eddie wonders if that’s because of how small he was back then — like stepping into an old elementary school you walked through a million times as a kid and thinking, _wow, no way the ceilings were always this low_ — or if the clown can be however tall it fucking needs to be.

Probably the latter, he thinks.

“Uh, yeah, it—”

The clown stalking forward, claws ripping from the sleeves of a Derry High letterman jacket, Bev tugging at his shirt and screaming, Bill trying to stand between him and It, and little terrified bug-eyed Richie holding his face and yelling _don’t look at it Eddie don’t look at it okay just look at me look at me Eds come on look at me—_

Eddie gulps, setting his coffee down and shaking his head. “Yeah. It did.”

“What does the fu— uh,” Richie winces, course correcting, “the friggin’ clown have against your arms, man?”

Eddie feels his eyebrows knit together. _“What?”_

“You know,” Richie says through a mouthful of muffin, shrugging. “First your arm breaks, and now you get shish kabobed through the shoulder. Like, what gives?”

Eddie considers arguing that technically the second one wasn’t the clown, it was Bowers. But then he thinks of Bowers saying _he told me how to find you, Eddie,_ and the disgusting reanimated corpse of Patrick Hockstetter and its crackling voice, and Bowers lunging at him with his eyes all yellow and shining like a cat’s, and he thinks, _Yeah, okay. Maybe not._

He sighs. “I don’t know, dude.”

“I say we just lob one of ‘em off,” Richie says, complete with a quick chopping motion at Eddie’s left arm, just below the shoulder. “Offer it up as a sacrifice and maybe the clown’ll eff off for another twenty-seven years, huh? Mike? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s worth a shot.”

Eddie closes his eyes and shakes his head in the best _done with you_ way he possibly can, and when he opens them, Mike seems to be caught in the classic mix of bemused and dismayed that is pretty much par for the course whenever Richie opens his mouth.

“I think, maybe,” Mike says, “that kind of sacrifice isn’t gonna work.”

“Not _that_ kind,” Stan repeats, his eyes hard and centered on Mike, “but _a_ kind?”

“I’m… not sure.”

“Oh, come on, share with the class,” Richie says as he leans his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands, batting his eyes at Mike. Then he asks, like they’re on a nice normal vacation and Mike’s their certified tour guide, “What’s the plan for the day, Mikey?”

Mike hesitates. His gaze passes around to each of them in turn and seems to linger, extra hesitant, on Frannie. Then he admits, talking slowly like he’s walking on eggshells, “I’m still not entirely sure, but I think what we talked about yesterday is still probably the best course of action for now. I think we need to split up.”

Eddie stares at him, eyes wide, and he blinks. “Uh. _What?”_

Out of all of them, Mike is the only one that even has the grace to look uncomfortable, but given he’s the one that’s going ahead and _suggesting_ this, Eddie’s incredulous glare stays right where it is. Right on Mike.

“What,” he repeats, “the _hell_ do you mean, we gotta split up?”

Richie blows a raspberry through his lips. “Told ya guys he wouldn’t like it.”

“None of us like it,” Ben says, all tired and worn down, like they’ve had this entire conversation a hundred times already. “But we don’t exactly _like_ any of this, do we?”

Bill nods. “But it’s what h- has to be done.”

“Has to be done,” Eddie repeats, shooting Bill a withering glare. “Yeah, ‘cause us splitting up is totally a necessary step in fighting the thing that, I will remind everyone, _likes to attack us when we’re alone._ I mean, what the—” he very nearly says fuck out loud, remembers himself, and says, _“hell_ is this, Scooby Doo? We’re just gonna split up and look for clues, is that it?”

“You know, that’s _exactly_ what I said,” Richie says, like he’s not even telling Eddie but just thinking aloud. “Not in so many words, but y’know.”

Eddie drags his left hand over his face, suppressing a wince when the movement bothers his injured shoulder, and he sits back and levels a half-hearted glare at Mike.

“Why do you think we need to split up, huh? You know, statistically speaking, survival scenarios, we’re gonna do way better as a group.”

“And _that’s_ exactly what I said,” Stanley speaks up, calmly sipping from his own coffee.

“Okay, seriously, how did you guys even have time to _have_ this conversation?” Eddie asks, throwing his hands up. “How the hell long have you all been up deciding we’re gonna break the literal _first_ rule of horror movies and get ourselves picked off one by one? Did I get outvoted or something?”

Mike looks stricken for a second; he opens his mouth, hesitates, and shuts his mouth again. Ben cringes. Bev’s face goes a little pale.

Richie, on the other hand, apparently holds no such reservations.

“Oh, Eds, you were a little busy, uh—” he cuts off, then mimes with his hands what Eddie instantly recognizes to be a fucking _stabbing motion_ before he settles with saying, “You had your hands full. Y’know. When we first brought it up.”

“Eddie,” Mike cuts in before Eddie can smack Richie in the back of the head again, this time for miming his own stabbing _in front of his daughter,_ even though Frannie seems entirely unaffected by it, watching the rest of them debate their next course of action like she thinks she’ll be quizzed on it later. Mike continues, calm as anything, “This was when we thought you were already out of town. The plan was for all of us to split up, but now there are… unforeseen circumstances—”

Richie makes a little _wermp wermp_ noise and points with his thumb at Frannie.

“Uh. Yeah,” Mike admits. “So the plans are gonna have to change a little bit.”

Eddie reaches over, breaks off the yet untouched quarter of Frannie’s blueberry muffin, and takes it for himself. “What’s a _little bit,_ Mike?”

“Well, we should still split up— _mostly,”_ Mike says, raising his hands in surrender, because Eddie just got puffed up to argue even though he’s got a hunk of muffin in his mouth. “It’s… listen, none of you remember everything, not yet, right? We went into the house on Neibolt Street, and you broke your arm, and then we all made it out, and we fought.”

“Yes, Mike,” Eddie says, shrugging as if to say _what’s your point?_ “I know. I already remember all of that, so—”

“But what about after? What happened after we fought?”

Eddie freezes. His shoulders drop a bit, hackles lowering.

“None of us c- c- can remember it,” Bill says, a solemn look on his face.

“And we need to,” Bev adds.

“I have to be honest with you, Eddie, and with _all_ of you,” Mike says, tapping a finger on the wood of the table as he speaks, as he thinks. “And the truth is, I really don’t know how we’re going to kill It. I’ve done so much research over the years, so much digging and reading and trying to understand how It works, and… There _is_ a ritual— I don’t know how reliable it is, but it’s at least something, and even that’s nothing compared to what _we already did,_ I mean, what we did when we were kids, banding together, standing up to It, defeating It—”

“It still came back,” Eddie reminds him.

“Defeating It temporarily, then,” Mike says, undeterred. If anything, Eddie’s uncertainty only seems to encourage him. “Whether temporary or not, we still did more than anyone before us ever had. It comes back in twenty-five to twenty-eight year cycles, and usually for months, _years_ at a time. We cut that time short when we fought It that summer. That’s no small thing.”

“Feels kinda small now, Mikey,” Richie says, himself sounding small and more subdued than Eddie’s used to hearing from him, with his arms crossed and his elbows still on the table.

“It’s not,” Mike assures him, assures all of them. “What we did that summer was _never done before._ It had never been done, not in thousands of years of this thing terrorizing Derry.”

“Well, yeah,” Frannie speaks up, pausing for a moment in the slurping of her orange juice, “you guys beat up a monster that’s older than anybody you’ve ever met, _and_ you beat it up so bad that it went to sleep and didn’t come out for longer than I’ve even been alive. That kinda sounds like it’s a big deal.”

Mike beams at her. The rest of them can’t seem to help smiling, either, and Ben tilts his head and says, “She’s got a point.”

“Exactly. We did something incredible that summer,” Mike goes on, “and we need to try and replicate that, and hopefully do it _better._ For good this time.”

“And you’re saying we have to remember in order to do that,” Stan follows along, though he does not sound like he likes it, and Eddie can relate. “So why split up, Mike? Feels like our chances of remembering stay the same whether we split up or not.”

Mike shrugs. “Call it intuition?”

“Intuition,” Eddie repeats. “Seriously.”

“You have to admit, that’s exactly how we did things back then,” Ben speaks up. “That was always how we decided what we were gonna do, wasn’t it?”

“Little kid intuition,” Bev says, staring down at the table. Or through the table, maybe.

“Exactly,” Mike agrees again. “That’s why I still think it’s best if most of you split up, but… well, I don’t think any of us are too comfortable with leaving you guys—” he nods at Eddie and at Frannie— “on your own.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Richie mutters.

“We’ll buddy up,” Stan volunteers, leaning back and gesturing with a nod of his own at Eddie and Fran. “Have a feeling we’re gonna be heading in the same direction anyway. Then we’ll have two sets of eyes to make sure nothing happens.”

 _To make sure nothing happens to her,_ he doesn’t say, but the implication rings loud and clear, and the fact that they’re all so concerned with looking out for Fran has the weird dual effect of soothing Eddie’s nerves and simultaneously ramping his anxiety up to a thousand. He tightens his grip on his own arms and offers Stan a grateful, if tight-lipped, smile over Frannie’s head.

“Okay,” Mike says, nodding. “So we’re all alright with that?”

He looks toward Bill first — because of course he does, it’s _Bill_ — and after Bill gives a nod, the rest of them are quick to follow.

Mike says, “Okay. So everyone except for Stan and Eddie and Frannie will split up, and you guys all just go wherever your feet take you. Don’t overthink it too much. Take a walking tour of Derry and see what you can remember, and then when you’re done, we can all meet up at the library and try to put a plan together.”

“And try not to get eaten,” Richie adds, shrugging one shoulder. “You know, ideally.”

“… Yeah,” Mike agrees, though he blanches a bit at the mention of it. “That, too.”

Somehow, the pharmacy on Canal Street looks exactly the same as it did twenty-seven years ago.

It’s like someone boxed the fucking thing up and sealed it away in a time capsule. Like it’s been sitting here all these years, gathering dust, ready and waiting for Eddie to slink back in and fill another script, to grab another big brown bag sagging with the weight of a dozen different kinds of pills, to pick up another refill for the aspirator that is still, to this day, sitting in his jacket pocket like being away from it for more than a few hours would be a fucking death sentence.

Of course, now that he thinks about it, the aspirator’s been empty for way longer than a few hours now, hasn’t it? What’s it been now, almost twelve? And he’s still here. Alive. Mostly unhurt, stab wound notwithstanding. Not dead or dying of an asthma attack, though, that’s for sure.

(And again it’s the boys room in their old high school, the walls spinning around him, his breath stuttering in his chest and _no Richie goddammit I’m not using the fucking inhaler it’s bullshit you know it’s fucking bullshit dude—)_

“Eddie.”

Stanley’s standing in the entrance to the pharmacy, holding the door open. Frannie’s already stepped inside, but she turned around when it became apparent that neither of them were following behind, and now she frowns, her eyes moving from Eddie to Stan and back again.

The glass fronted walls of the pharmacy stretch out on either side of them, wide and imposing and gleaming in the sun, and for one very insane moment Eddie imagines that the whole place is about to swell up and lurch forward and engulf all three of them in a rush of brick and concrete and shattering glass. The pharmacy is a two-story-tall macrophage and Eddie’s a speck of dirt or a pathogen or _something_ fucked up and dangerous that needs to be wiped out, something _dirty,_ and Stan and Frannie are just— collateral damage, maybe. Fuck.

“Still with us?” Stanley asks, and Eddie forcibly shakes himself out of it.

“Yep, all good,” he answers, nodding as he speed walks ahead into the store too fast to chicken out. “Yep, let’s— let’s do this. Pharmacy, then your dad’s old office at the synagogue, right?”

Stan lets the door swing shut behind them with the obnoxious clanging rattle of the bell, and he shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Huh?” Eddie turns, raises an eyebrow at him. “Wait, was that not the plan?”

“Maybe. I’m trying not to _overthink_ it, remember?”

“… Oh.”

Eddie means to say something a little more coherent than that, but he’s… stuck, kind of. He’s stuck standing right where he’s at, because in his line of sight, not ten feet away behind a few haphazardly stacked piles of empty boxes, is a door.

 _The_ door. The door that sure as hell should have an _Employees Only_ sign on it but doesn’t, the door that sure as hell should be shut and locked to prevent random patrons and scared thirteen-year-old boys from wandering in on a fucking whim, but it never is.

That door.

Eddie tears his eyes away long enough to cast a sweeping look over the pharmacy itself, and Christ, if he thought the _outside_ of the place was a time capsule, the inside seems like it’s been crystallized and plucked straight out of his brain. He’s pretty sure that’s even Dr. Keene over there, hunched over behind the counter putzing around still after twenty-seven years. Eddie takes a breath, tightens his grip on the empty _(useless it’s bullshit it’s all bullshit)_ inhaler in his jacket pocket.

Jesus, it’s almost like he can hear it, isn’t it? His mother’s voice calling from behind that godforsaken door, _Eddie, oh Eddie where are you, Eddie-bear don’t leave me here, Eddieeeee—_

“Uh,” Eddie says, eloquent as ever, and he shakes his head. Frannie’s sticking close to his side, just like she promised to, and Eddie nudges her and says, “Why don’t you go grab a few snacks, okay, honey? Whatever you want.”

She looks up at him, eyebrows up. “Yeah? Whatever I want?”

“I retain the right to veto, but yeah,” Eddie tells her. “Go ahead, take a look around.”

Frannie thinks that over for a second, then nods like she’s been given a mission of utmost importance and heads off purposefully toward the snack aisle. As she makes her way up and down the aisle, perusing boxes of popcorn and pretzels, Eddie asks, “Stan?”

“Mm.”

“Do you—? I mean, I can’t— I…”

Eddie squeezes the inhaler until he’s damn near certain the thing’s gonna crack right down the middle, and he keeps his eyes on Frannie as he finally wrangles out a full sentence from where it’s been sitting bitter on the back of his tongue.

“I think I fucked up.”

It comes out barely above a choked whisper, but it catches Stan’s attention. Stan’s still got his arms crossed, shoulders exactly as tense as they’ve been since dinner last night, eyes on Frannie just like Eddie’s are, but he shoots a quick look at Eddie now and asks, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Fran,” Eddie answers, a humorless half-smile on his face. “I think… Stan, the more I stay in this town, the more pissed off I get that I forgot everything, you know?”

He pulls the _(bullshit Richie it’s bullshit and you fucking know it)_ inhaler out of his pocket, and he turns the lightweight plastic over and over in his hands, eyes downcast but with Fran still in his peripheral. She’s moved on from the snack and candy aisle over to the hair products, humming as she shops.

Stan doesn’t interrupt, so Eddie takes a fortifying breath and asks, “This thing is… It’s just a piece of plastic, isn’t it? It was never… There was never anything in it. Just fucking water.”

He looks up, and behind the counter that is absolutely the same Dr. Keene from when they were kids, a geriatric should-have-retired-years-ago Dr. Keene that’s shuffling around and restocking a small shelf labelled with a litany of different prescriptions, and Eddie hears his voice from however fucking long ago saying _head-medicine do you understand that Eddie it’s head-medicine your lungs don’t have asthma your mind does Eddie a placebo is something that looks like medicine and tastes like medicine but it isn’t medicine—_

“Fuck,” Eddie mutters, squeezing his eyes shut until it hurts. “Fuck, _all_ of it was… It was all bullshit.”

_Richie goddammit I’m not using the fucking inhaler it’s bullshit you know it’s fucking bullshit dude—_

_What sickness, Ma?_

_It’s all bullshit they’re gazebos they’re BULLSHIT—_

“Stan?”

“Hm.”

“Was…? Stan, was my mom…?”

Eddie can’t bring himself to finish that question, or he just can’t bring himself to specify what exactly he suspects his mom _was._ He just needs Stanley to pick up that thread where Eddie leaves it and follow it where it needs to go, bring it to its natural conclusion since Eddie’s too fucking chickenshit to do it himself. And Stan was always good at that, he remembers. It was Eddie who always knew the _where,_ but it was Stanley who always knew the _what._

In any case, Stan seems to get the gist. Maybe.

His arms are still crossed, fingers tight on his opposite bicep through the cardigan he’s wearing, his eyes hard and unyielding and, Eddie thinks, maybe a little bit angry. Or a lot angry. It was always hard to tell when it came to Stan.

“Yeah, Eddie,” Stanley says. “As far as I remember, she was.”

 _“Fuck,”_ Eddie whispers, fist tightening around the lump of plastic again before he shoves it back into his pocket. Technically he should throw it out, he should just throw it the fuck out, he should run outside right now and toss it in the big trash can by the door and be done with it and— “I just _fucking_ forgot about it. All of it.”

“We all did,” Stan says, then tilts his head and shrugs one shoulder. “Sort of.”

“But I forgot what— I forgot what she was, _how_ she was, and then I went and turned around and did the exact same thing to _my_ kid, and—”

“Okay, no,” Stanley cuts in, quiet but firm. “I’m gonna stop you right there.”

“Huh? What do you…?”

There’s a teenager in a pharmacy polo and a nametag restocking shelves nearby that’s giving them both funny looks — which Eddie can’t blame her for — so Stan nudges Eddie aside, and the two of them slink over into the next aisle over. The top of Fran’s head is still visible two aisles away, and on the other side of the next shelving unit, the _door._

Eddie tries to stop imagining that he can hear his mother’s voice from the other side of it.

Stan huffs a sigh and says, “You didn’t do the same thing she did, Eddie.”

“You—? _What?_ How can you—?”

“Because I have functioning fucking eyes, dumbass.”

“But—”

“Let me ask you this. Does she carry her own inhaler around?”

Eddie all but actually chokes on his next words, and he frowns. “I— No, dude, she doesn’t have—”

“Asthma?” Stan asks, raising an eyebrow.

He’s not smiling; there’s no _gotcha_ look on his face, just a no-nonsense gravity and some of that might-be-anger, which Eddie’s starting to recognize _is_ actual anger. It’s a quieter version than he’s used to, though, low and calm and simmering under the surface.

“Look, Stan, that’s not—”

But Stanley’s not done, apparently. “Did you ever forbid her from seeing any of her friends because one of them had a cough? Or because one of them gave you a weird attitude?”

“Stan—”

“Did you ever give her medications she didn’t need? Ever make her think she was sick when she wasn’t? Ever lock her in her bedroom and not let her out?”

“Jesus Christ, Stan,” Eddie croaks, ducking his head down and pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. His instinct was to immediately say _Jesus Christ, Stan, of course not,_ because the fact is, Eddie never did any of that. He never _could_ have. He may have had a nigh uncountable amount of panic attacks in the first few years of Fran’s life, and he may have genuinely believed she was at risk of actually literally _dying_ every time she caught even the mildest of colds, but he always stomped down on that instinct and shoved it somewhere Fran couldn’t see it.

Fuck, he might have been terrified out of his mind half the time _(all the time)_ but hell if he was gonna let any of that fear reach his kid. Hell if he was gonna let her feel anything close to what he was feeling.

But he doesn’t say _Jesus Christ, Stan, of course not,_ because… well, because he’s not an idiot. He knows why Stan’s asking all of this, thanks to the renewed clarity that’s seeping into all the little nooks and crannies of his brain where he used to keep all his childhood memories safely tucked away. He knows _exactly_ why Stan’s asking all of this.

He drops his hand, takes a slow breath in, purses his lips and blows it out as slow as he can. Something’s stuck in his throat, and he swears he can still hear it, he can still hear _It,_ he can still hear his mother wailing _Eddie-bear where are you why did you leave I knew were going to leave me Eddie—_

“No,” he manages to say anyway, not quite looking at Stan. “No, I didn’t.”

Stanley nods once in his peripheral. “Good. ‘Cause one of us would’ve had to kick your ass if you did.”

At that moment, Fran comes skipping up from what is definitely not the snack aisle, arms laden with snacks and a box Eddie can’t quite make out and one bottle of… something. Eddie has no idea what. Not food, though.

In any case, Stanley’s expression turns on a dime the second she’s in earshot. He softens, all those angry rough edges vanishing away into nothing, and he smiles down at her with his hands in the pockets of his cardigan. Like he’s a totally different _goddamn_ person.

Eddie is definitely gonna have to ask him how the hell he does that.

“Found what you needed?” Stan asks, nodding down at the pile of goodies she’s carrying.

“Yup! I got some Blow Pops and some cheddar popcorn and some pretzels. _Also,_ Dad, can I get this—” she lifts the bottle and gives it a shake for both of them to see— “bottle of leave-in conditioner, too? ‘Cause yesterday at dinner Beverly said that if I only wash my hair every _other_ day instead of every day and I use _this_ leave in conditioner when I get out of the shower then my hair will still be clean but it’ll be super duper soft like her hair is _and_ it’ll smell like peppermint.”

Eddie squints. “Do you… _want_ your hair to smell like peppermint?”

Frannie’s answering nod is so enthusiastic that Eddie can’t help laughing, and he shakes his head.

“Okay. Let’s get the, uh, the _leave-in conditioner_ then,” Eddie says, then nods down at all the things she’s carrying and asks, “What’s the other thing?”

“Huh?”

God, he knows most kids have terrible poker faces, but _his_ kid’s poker face is a whole other level of bad. “I said, what’s the other thing?”

“What other thing?”

“The _box,_ Francine.”

She holds out for another second before sinking into a pout and rolling her eyes, and she pulls the box out from where it’s been squeezed between a bag of Blow Pops and a bag of pretzels.

As soon as Eddie sees it, he shakes his head. “Absolutely not.”

“But _Dad—”_

“No. Buts. I am not buying you _Bang Snaps,”_ Eddie says, eyeing up the box that proudly says _POP! POP!_ with an image of the little tiny bombs wrapped in paper next to a cartoon of a dancing girl in a dress. Why the fuck are they even selling novelty firework products at a convenience store?

Jesus Christ, Maine is such a shitshow.

“Hm,” Stan says, frowning. “We always called them Pop Pop Snappers.”

“Call them whatever you want, I’m not buying them,” Eddie says. “You aim one of those too close to somebody and it’ll blow their feet off or something. You can get everything else, even the leave-in conditioner that you totally grabbed to distract me from the _literal bombs_ you wanted to buy, but you’re putting those back where you found them.”

Fran rolls her eyes again. “Fine.”

Stan huffs a laugh, one corner of his mouth quirking up in a barely-there smile, and he shakes his head. “Alright, so we’ll wrap up here, and then what?” he asks, hands still in his pockets as he turns to shoot a quick look at Eddie. “What comes next? Any ideas?”

Eddie hesitates, all thoughts of snacks and _pop pop snappers_ gone from his mind in an instant, and again he glances in the direction of—

— of the door.

He’s still got a firm grip on the inhaler in his pocket, and the echo of his mother’s panicked voice is ricocheting like a fucking pinball around his brain no matter how much he tries to banish it, and either he’s seeing things or the door’s even more ajar than it was a few minutes ago, and—

Eddie fishes his wallet out of his back pocket and hands it to Stan. His eyes don’t leave the door.

“Ring her up for her stuff, and uh. Grab me a bomb pop while you’re at it, will you?”

Stan takes his wallet, following his gaze to the door. “You don’t want company?”

He shakes his head before he can talk himself out of it. “No. You guys stay up here, okay? I think…”

Eddie pauses. He gulps, because his mouth is a fucking desert all over again. _Follow your gut. Don’t overthink it, just go wherever your feet take you._

“I think this is something I need to do alone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the bit about dr. keene and _head medicine_ comes from the book; i vastly preferred dr. keene explaining the placebos to eddie over the way greta told him in the movie (but like, i get it, time constaints, it's a stupidly long book) so yeah i supplanted that into what's "canon" for this fic
> 
> also, re: mike not immediately being like "go get your tokens for this SUPER LEGIT ritual i found guys," i feel like that's the major thing that changes when there's a child present. the stakes are way higher, so mike's less "i have to hope it'll work if they believe" and more "fuck! shit! i need a new plan to kill this fucking clown that does not maybe result in us (and this child) getting incinerated! fuck!" and he is desperately grasping at straws and trying to seem like he's more sure about this whole thing than he actually is. poor dude did not expect a kid coming along for this incredibly dangerous ride lmao


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warnings for this chapter:** general horror, blood, creepiness, brief mention of hospitals and heart attacks and open-casket funerals, a bit of body horror, and uh. you know. the clown

There are some memories, Stan thinks, that are lifting from the fog more quickly than others.

This pharmacy is not one of them.

He still has only the vaguest of memories of the interior of this place, memories bookended by a whirlwind of panic, the grimey alley next door, Ben’s slashed up stomach and little teenage Eddie’s manic application of first aid and — _how do you amputate a HOW DO YOU AMPUTATE A WAIST_ — and really, compared with all of that, the pharmacy itself is just a dull sterilized interim. Neat little rows of stationary and feminine products and medicines. In fact, Stanely thinks he only remembers it at _all_ because, when all is said and done, this is technically where he met Bev, and because meeting Bev was like meeting Ben and it was like meeting Mike, in that it came with that weird feeling of something essential and inevitable slotting into its proper place, that feeling of _rightness_ that was always so fucking hard to come by in Derry. Especially in those days, especially in that summer.

So, no, altogether he wouldn’t say he remembers the pharmacy all that well.

From what little he remembers of it, though, he thinks he can say without a shadow of a doubt that Dr. Keene is somehow both exactly the same and _infinitely_ creepier than he was when they were kids.

For the love of God, how has this guy not retired yet?

“A’right, we got Blow Pops, popcorn…” Dr. Keene all but croaks under his breath as he slides all their stuff into a crinkling brown paper bag like he’s sweeping dust off the counter, and his thin lips curl back in an almost-scowl as he rattles off the list, revealing a sliver of yellowing teeth. “Box of bomb pops, pretzels…”

And Stan obviously doesn’t want to judge a person for something as ridiculous as _aging,_ something that literally every person is bound to do — barring an even more unpleasant alternative, anyway — but the thing is, Dr. Keene has the air of someone who has not aged well in every single sense of the term. All the way down to his core, in a way that goes way beyond the physical. Like the guy’s probably still pissed off about desegregation or something, and he’s damn proud of it.

“That’ll be fourteen-oh-eight, Sonny.”

His eyes catch on Stan’s face when he looks up, and Stan has enough time to think _please oh please do not recognize me, the last thing I want to do is have a conversation right now,_ before Dr. Keene’s eyes flick up to his hair and then back down and over to Fran.

“Oh,” Stan says before he can get another word in, sliding the box of Pop Pop Snappers across the counter. “And these, too, if you don’t mind.”

Fran looks up at him with wide eyes, apparently completely unperturbed by Keene, her jaw dropping.

“But my dad said—”

“He said he wasn’t gonna buy them for you,” Stan says, glancing down at her and giving her a quick, subtle wink. “Never said I couldn’t buy some for myself. And if I happen to want to share them, then…”

He shrugs, and the kid’s eyes get twice as wide, a conspiratorial smile spreading over her face that reminds him _so_ much of little eight-year-old Olive that for a moment he physically aches with it. She even mimes zipping her own lips shut, bouncing on her toes at the prospect of smacking those little firecrackers into the ground outside, and Stan decides then and there that this was a good decision. God knows they need something to lighten the mood around here, after all they’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours.

“Nineteen sixty,” Dr. Keene reads off.

Stanley swipes his card and punches the pin in a rush, eager to get away from Dr. Keene’s prying looks and his sterile stuffy pharmacy as quickly as he possibly can. Keene’s pallid gray eyes remain on him as the receipt _tick tick ticks_ its way out of the printer above the register, agonizingly slow, and after what feels like a fucking eternity his old weathered hand reaches up and rips it off the printer’s serrated paper cutter.

“Have a good one,” Stan says, automatic, and then he pockets the Pop Pop Snappers and snatches up the bag and steers Fran away from the counter in the direction of the door. _Let’s go, go, go,_ he thinks, because he’s not staying in this place a single second longer than he needs to. They’ll go outside and wait for Eddie to get done whatever the hell he’s doing down in the pharmacy’s basement, they’ll wait for him to resurface, and if he never resurfaces at all, well. _Then_ it’ll be time to worry. _Then_ it’ll be time to rally the Losers and storm the place. But that is not the situation right now, and Stanley Uris has never been someone to jump to conclusions before he needs to.

Then, when they’re halfway to the door, Dr. Keene speaks up again—

“Your wife know what you’re doing all the way up here in Derry, Mr. Uris?”

— and Stan freezes.

Stops dead in his tracks.

God damn it.

God _fucking_ damn it.

It’s a peculiar thing, feeling this sort of bone-deep terror and righteous anger rising in him all at once. Anger not even really at Dr. Keene but at the thing that’s no doubt influencing him the way it’s influencing all of Derry. Anger at _It_ for daring to even fucking mention his wife. Stan slowly unfreezes. He turns around, chips of ice clinking their way down his spine, his free hand gripping tightly to the sleeve of Fran’s jacket, the other holding the brown paper bag in front of his own stomach like some kind of shield.

Dr. Keene just grins back at him, all yellowed teeth and crinkling paper skin pulling in his cheeks, and it _has_ to be a trick of the light, it _has_ to be, but Stan swears he almost sees a flash of golden yellow light flickering in those old gray eyes.

Stan takes a breath.

“What did you just say?”

“I _said,_ you have a nice day now, Mr. Uris,” Dr. Keene repeats, that sly smile unwavering, and he raises an eyebrow. “Oh, what? Come on, you think I didn’t recognize you, kid?”

Stan gulps. “Uh… yeah. I guess I thought you didn’t.”

“Nah,” Keene drawls. “Spittin’ image of your old man, aren’t ya? Haven’t seen your folks in… what, twenty _years_ it’s been now, huh? That’s a long, long time to be so far away from home, don’t you think?”

“Right,” Stan nods, gently pushing Fran further toward the door. Dr. Keene’s face seems to have frozen on that expression, stock still, until it seems like the wide yellowed smile and the laugh lines are carved into stone. Stan tears his eyes away as soon as they’re within range of the door, ushering Fran outside. “Well, next time I see them, I’ll be sure to tell them you said hello.”

It’s a lie, of course, just to get them out the door faster. He hasn’t even spoken to his father in over a decade, and hell if he’s ever mentioning any of this to his mother over the phone.

“You do that, Sonny,” Dr. Keene’s voice follows him out through the door, and it isn’t until the bell chimes behind them that Stanley feels like he can take a full fucking breath again.

Fuck.

_Fuck._

“You okay?” Fran asks.

“Yeah, yeah, of course I am,” Stan answers right away. He releases his hold on her jacket sleeve, flexing his fingers — they’ve gone a bit numb and achy from gripping on so tight — and he motions for her to follow him to the little park bench across the street. “Come on, let’s wait for your dad over here, alright?”

His heart’s still driving a jackhammer into his lungs, but he shakes himself out of it, forces himself to move one foot in front of the other. They reach the bench and wordlessly sit down side-by-side, Fran already digging her arm elbow-deep into the bag of Blow Pops. She offers him one, and he takes it without even considering refusing it.

_That’s a long, long time to be so far away from home._

_Your wife know what you’re doing all the way up here in Derry, Mr. Uris?_

Stan shakes his head, puts the Blow Pop into his mouth to free up his hands, and pulls out his phone to type out a quick text to Patty. Just to check in. Just to be sure.

As Fran sets about unwrapping her own Blow Pop with careful precision beside him, she asks without looking up, “Why’d Dad have to go in the _basement,_ anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” Stan answers honestly, eyes fixed on his phone screen as he waits for the reply, or even just the fucking read receipt. “I think we’re just gonna have to ask him when he gets back.”

Around them, there’s hardly any sound at all except for the low thrum of what might be cars moving somewhere they can’t see, that and the distant chirping of a warbler or two. It’s the kind of oppressive silence that Stan had almost forgotten about, the kind that made Derry feel so vast and so _hostile_ all those years. The oppressive silence that sits at the eye of a storm. The oppressive silence of a hundred awkward family dinners after a botched Bar Mitzvah and a mic drop.

By anyone else’s standards, though, it’d be a gorgeous day. A _hell_ of a gorgeous day. Bright golden sunlight and grass so green and a sky so blue it’s like someone turned the saturation up too high on a computer screen.

“He’s gonna be okay, right?” Fran asks, tearing him from his thoughts.

Stan nudges her with an elbow, shifts the lollipop over into his cheek so he can talk around it. “Tell you what. If he’s not back in ten minutes, we’ll go down there and get him ourselves, just to be sure. Sound good?”

“Yeah,” Fran nods. She’s still staring resolutely ahead at the pharmacy with an intensity that would rival her dad’s, even as she rolls the Blow Pop around in her mouth, the corners of her lips somehow already stained blue. “Ten minutes,” she repeats. To her, it’s set in stone now, an iron-clad rule the moment the words left Stan’s mouth. “Otherwise the popsicles you got him are all gonna melt.”

Stan blinks, then huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Right, exactly.”

His phone vibrates in his hand, and he’s in such a hurry to wake the screen that he nearly fucking drops it, fumbling with it for half a second before he manages to open it up to a notification of a text from Patty.

Some of the tension unknots from his shoulders.

She answered. She’s okay. She’s blown right past his concerns about her and asked how _he’s_ doing, of all things, because of course she has. Of course she’s okay, she’s well over a thousand miles away from Derry, safe and sound in their home in Atlanta. Stan shakes his head and types out a quick but heartfelt response. _Missing my wife,_ he says, because it’s true. _Missing those strange little gremlins that live in our house. Can’t wait until I get back._

He sends it off, watches the three dots blink and blink and blink, and a smile comes to his face unbidden as he pictures the way his babylove types. One finger at a time, so it takes her a full minute to type even the simplest of messages. It’s unfairly endearing, always has been. Just like everything else about her.

 _Missing you too,_ she answers with a kissing emoji and seven hearts in all different colors. _Can’t wait to tell you about Andy’s soccer practice today._

She punctuates it with an eye-rolling emoji, and Stan grins wide around the lollipop still in his mouth.

 _Tell me now,_ he says. _I’ve got time._

The three dots light up again, blinking and blinking and blinking, and Stan keeps his eyes on them right up until the screen goes black.

And there, in the sleek shining surface of his phone’s screen, beside the darkened silhouette of his own reflection, is a second shape over his shoulder that _should not be there._

_“Fuck!”_

Stan jumps away from the bench, whirling around to face it, to face _It,_ the darkened distorted too-long shape of that painted woman’s face swimming in the forefront of his mind with all of her jagged teeth and a wide gaping through filled with swirling bobbing fucking _infinite_ lights and—

And there’s nothing there.

Nothing. Just the park stretching out in front of him, crisp and green, nothing but a few trees with their leaves rustling in the breeze, a swingset rhythmically creaking as its swings move back and forth, back and forth, a pair of mistimed pendulums.

“Uh,” Fran says, mouth open with the little white lollipop stick hanging out of it, wide brown eyes on him. “What—?”

“On second thought,” Stanley says a little too loudly, his eyes darting around as he scans over every single thing he can fucking see, every lamppost, every tree branch, every street sign, like a small animal searching his surroundings for a predator — and, he realizes with a slightly hysterical half-laugh that catches in his throat, that’s _exactly_ what he fucking is — before he forces some semblance of steadiness into his voice and repeats, “On _second_ thought. Uh. How about we go get your dad now?”

Fran hops off the bench, already nodding. She’d clearly been waiting on an excuse, waiting on even the slightest sign of permission so that she could storm back in there after Eddie herself. She pulls the Blow Pop out of her mouth so that it _pops,_ and she points it at the pharmacy as if to say, _Come on, old man, let’s go!_

They don’t get very far, though.

They’re about halfway across the street when the front door to the pharmacy bursts open, so loud and so urgently that Stan automatically jerks back a step with a fist at the back of Fran’s jacket.

“Holy _crap,”_ Fran shouts, jaw dropping. “Dad?”

Stan finds himself almost mirroring her, feels his eyebrows ticking up, his forehead creasing. Eddie comes shuffling out of the pharmacy in rapid barely-controlled steps, clearly trying and _spectacularly_ failing to look like he’s not in the biggest hurry of his life. His eyes are blown wide, shoulders hunched, and he is _covered_ in black sludge. Head to toe. Like he flew the coop right before he was set to be tarred and feathered.

He pauses in front of them, literally _dripping_ all that black sludge from every square inch of his clothes. A glob of it comes off his chin when he stops, and it hits the asphalt below them with a dull _plop._

“Hey, guys,” he breathes, panting like he’s riding the tail end of the adrenaline rush from a fucking marathon. Or like he just sprinted up a set of basement steps, fleeing for his life. Or like he’s on the verge of a panic attack. Stan’s genuinely not sure which.

Stan blinks, eyes him up and down. “Guessing it went well, then.”

“Yup!” Eddie borderline shouts, his eyes wide and a little manic. “Great!”

“Dad?” Fran says, raising an eyebrow. “You okay?”

“Peachy! Fantastic!” Eddie shouts again, throwing his hands out to the side and dropping them again with a sickening _squelch._ He reeks of vomit, Stan realizes. That’s what all that gook is, it’s vomit, and the memory hits Stan like a sledgehammer to the frontal lobe of Eddie soaked in that disgusting diseased _thing’s_ puke, the way he’d shrieked and swung his foot at the thing’s head, terror funneling into rage at the drop of a hat. “Everything is—” Eddie holds up his right hand, thumb and forefinger together, his mouth a thin line— “A-OK! I’m good! Totally fine! _Let’s_ go to the synagogue! I’m ready!”

Eddie’s shoulders are hiked all the way up, giving Stan the uncanny impression of a turtle trying to retreat into his shell. Or a turtle covered in tar, anyway. Stan stares at him for a moment, narrow eyed, and then he says, “We can just go back to the town house, man.”

“Are—” Eddie’s voice catches. His shoulders drop half an inch. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie repeats, “You’re _sure.”_

“What did I just say? _Yes._ I’m sure. Honestly, I still kind of think this splitting up thing is a crock of bull anyway,” Stan answers with a shrug, “and I really didn’t want to set foot in that place if I didn’t have to. If I gotta go later, I’ll go later. But not now.”

Eddie sags completely. “Oh, thank _God.”_

“You good?”

“Yeah, I think— I think I might be having a panic attack? Small one.” He lifts his hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching. “But I’m not… totally sure.”

“If you think you’re having a panic attack, you’re probably having a panic attack,” Stan informs him, though in actuality he’s not entirely sure that’s how it works. “You need something?”

“I need a _shower,”_ Eddie says, wiping both hands down his face, which does just about nothing to clean the vomit away. “I need a shower, and a nap, and— and…”

“How ‘bout this?”

Eddie blinks down at Fran, staring wide-eyed at the plastic wrapped bomb pop she’s holding out for him. Stan can just make out the red, white, and blue showing faintly through the white plastic, and after a beat of hesitation Eddie actually cracks a smile. It’s hard to tell through the goop on his face, but Stan thinks it even looks genuine.

“You know what?” Eddie says, nodding. “Yeah. I— yeah. Thanks, honey.”

He digs around in his pockets until he finds a packet of tissues, meticulously wiping his fingers as clean as they can possibly get, and he works through the entire pack before his hands and his face look even remotely presentable. He wads up the ball of soaked black tissues and tosses them at the trash can at the curb, misses, and stares at it balefully for a few seconds before giving up entirely and just taking the popsicle from his daughter’s hand.

As the three of them make their way up the road back toward the Derry Town House, Stan on Frannie’s left and Eddie on her right, flanking her like a pair of wildly underqualified bodyguards, Stan pops the lollipop out of his mouth and asks, “Vomit, though? Really?”

Eddie shoots him a look. “Uh. Yeah?”

“I dunno, it’s just,” Stan shrugs. “Eddie, you have a _child._ How does getting thrown up on even phase you anymore? How is _vomit_ what that thing decides to come after you with? Shouldn’t you be used to that by now?”

“Wha— I—” Eddie stammers, then gestures wildly with his half-eaten bomb pop. “Stan, that was _baby_ vomit! It was obviously different!”

Stan grins, pushing the lollipop over into his cheek to ask, “You had a panic attack every time she spit up on you, didn’t you?”

“The first few months, yes!” Eddie shouts, high-pitched and cutting his free hand through the air. “WHAT is your point!”

As Eddie steps out of the shower, he grabs his phone off the bathroom sink and double checks his notifications. The nonstop texts from Myra have long since tapered off — he imagines she’s probably just about given up on him and has moved on to texting Frannie instead, and isn’t _that_ a troubling thought to pile on top of all the others for today — but he doesn’t have any other notifications, either.

He sighs and opens up his conversation with Richie, which consists of a grand total of four texts since they exchanged numbers last night.

The message Eddie sent half an hour ago _(“Hey Rich, we’re heading back to the town house. Meet us there before we all go to Mike’s?”)_ remains unanswered but, unlike when Eddie last checked, it does say that Richie at least read the text. So he’s probably alive, at the very least, and probably in good enough shape to use his phone. Which… technically was not a guarantee.

So that’s, uh. Good. Better than the worst case scenario, anyway.

Still. Eddie types one more message _(“Still alive?”)_ and sends it off, resolutely placing his phone screen-side-down on the sink before he sets about getting into some clean clothes that aren’t soaked in _goddamn fucking leper vomit._

Ten minutes later he’s jogging down the steps toward the town house lounge, only to find—

Oh. Everyone’s hanging out on the staircase. Okay.

Ben and Bev are sitting on the bottommost stair, side by side, and something about that pokes at something in Eddie’s memory that’s _right_ fucking there but he can’t quite grasp. He doesn’t allow himself to dwell on it, though, because really, if it’s important he’s sure he’ll remember it later. Stan and Frannie, on the other hand, are sitting a few stairs above them, huddled together with their heads ducked down, having what _sounds_ like a whispered but no less heated debate about the relative intelligence of turtles.

“Hey,” Eddie says, sitting down on Fran’s other side—

— just as the front door to the town house slams open, scaring the _fucking_ daylights out of him. And everyone else, too, if Bev’s shriek is anything to go by.

“God _damn_ it, Bill,” Eddie mutters, dropping his head into his hand. He doesn’t even bother with the customary apology to Fran for cursing; it’s just gonna happen more and more as this shitstorm unfolds, he knows, and she’s a smart enough kid to know what she is and isn’t allowed to repeat.

Bill sheepishly closes the door behind him with an awkward, apologetic smile, but not before a gust of wind outside sends a draft whistling in through the open doorway, a whirl of cold air that sends a chill up Eddie’s spine. It carries a scattered bunch of dead leaves in with it, too, swirling in a tiny twister on the hotel floor— which doesn’t make any fucking sense, since it’s the middle of goddamn August, but whatever.

God, Eddie can’t wait to be out of Derry. This place is _determined_ to be as creepy as possible and fuck all logic.

Bill doesn’t seem perturbed, because of course he doesn’t. He sidles up to the staircase and leans against the banister, hands in his pockets. “Any, uh, any l- luck?”

“Yeah, tons,” Stanley answers, reaching into the bag from the pharmacy and unwrapping another Blow Pop. His third, by Eddie’s count.

Ben tells him, “We were all thinking of just heading to Mike’s once we’re all together.”

“So, what,” Bill asks, eyes flicking up and down the stairs, “we’re just waiting on R- Richie?”

On impulse, Eddie checks his phone again, and a familiar little pit of dread coalesces in his stomach when he sees the lack of notifications. _Come on, man,_ he thinks, chewing on the inside of his bottom lip and opening up his texts to see that Richie hasn’t even read the most recent message much less answered it. _At least let me know you’re still—_

There’s a _BANG_ that cuts straight through his thoughts, not from the front door but from further up the stairs, and Eddie jumps, one arm already around Fran as he twists to try and see what could have made that noise—

“What the _hell?”_ Stanley whispers, eyes on the top of the stairs, and Eddie finds himself wondering the same damn thing.

Because it’s a _skateboard._

It’s a skateboard, just… fucking sitting there, up at the next bend of the staircase, its front wheels teetering on the edge of the top stair. Ben and Bev have already gotten up and off the steps, and Stan, Eddie, and Fran follow soon after, watching with wary eyes as the skateboard’s wheels creak and it rolls forward, hitting the next stair with another disproportionally loud _BANG,_ and then another _BANG_ as it hits the next stair, and the next, and the next.

“Should we be running?” Bev wonders aloud.

“It’s Derry,” Bill says, like that explains anything, and Eddie guesses it sort of does. “I’m kinda getting used to it.”

Eddie gulps, gently pushing Fran back with his one outstretched arm, watching as the skateboard _BANGS_ and _CLANGS_ its way down the stairs. It turns of its own accord when it reaches the bend right in front of them, and all six of them shuffle further backward to make room for it.

The skateboard hits the floor with one final _BANG_ and rolls to a slow stop, and—

“Oh, great,” Eddie finds himself saying. “Yeah. Why not.”

From out of nothing, there’s suddenly blood — and it is unmistakably blood, Eddie can fucking _smell_ it — welling up on the surface of the skateboard as if from a dozen needle pricks, growing and growing until they bleb off from the skateboard and float up into the air above it. The skateboard quivers, shaking like there’s something trapped underneath it trying to escape, and Eddie has a horrifying moment during which he’s certain that more of those charred rats are going to pour out from beneath it—

But then it flips over, and there’s nothing underneath it at all. Just a message, scrawled in what must be more of that sickening sharp smelling blood.

_WON’T BE THERE_

_FOR HIM, EITHER?_

Bev asks, “What— what does that mean?”

“Who the hell is _him?”_ Eddie asks, and that pit of dread in his stomach shakes and swells. Richie. It has to be Richie. Richie’s the only fucking one of them that’s not here, and if this message means what he thinks it means—

“Sh- shit,” Bill whispers, and Eddie looks back to see him with his hands in his hair, eyes wide and terrified and already shining like he’s about to cry. “It’s the k- kid.”

Eddie blinks. “The what?”

“Who?” Ben asks, reaching out to grab Bill’s shoulder, but he flinches away. “Bill, what kid?”

“The— the _kid,”_ Bill repeats, and he’s started pacing, only glancing at the rest of them while his eyes mostly remain glued on that fucking skateboard. “He’s— I saw him on the way here, he lives in my house, m- my old house. He’s going to the fair, and he…”

Bill sags, arms falling to his sides.

“The fair,” he repeats. “He’s going to the fair, I have to— I have to go—”

 _“Woah,_ woah, Bill,” Eddie says before he’s even got an argument prepared, but luckily the others all seem on the same page.

“Bill,” Stan says, hands up, placating. “Take a second, okay?”

“I— I _can’t,_ he—”

Bev shakes her head. “Bill, you can’t just leave, not now.”

“Hey, come on,” Ben tries. “She’s right. We shouldn’t split up again. We’ll wait for Richie to get back, and then we can all—”

As if on queue, the front door slams open again.

“Oh,” Ben says, dropping out of the tense stance he’d been in, eyes on the door. “Hey, Richie.”

The rest of them follow his gaze to the door, and there Richie is, hands shoved deep into his pockets and his shoulders almost all the way up to his ears, a six-foot-tall line of unbroken tension. He pauses in the doorway for about half a second, wide eyes on all of them like he hadn’t expected to find them all here at once, before he visibly shakes himself out of it and starts marching toward the stairs.

“I’m leaving,” is all he says.

It takes a second for that to register, and when it does—

“Wait, _what?”_ Eddie sputters, already moving to block his path to the stairs. “The hell do you mean you’re _leaving?”_

Richie stops in front of him, only because Eddie’s blocking his way with one hand tight on the banister and he doesn’t have any other _choice_ but to stop, but he still doesn’t quite meet Eddie’s eyes, glancing up at the top of the staircase. “Move.”

“Uh. No?”

_“Move.”_

“Richie,” Bev tries, and Eddie glances toward her only to see that, behind her, Bill is already halfway to the door now that everyone’s attention is on Richie. Fuck. _Shit._ Goddammit, it’s all coming apart, _they’re_ all coming apart, and it’s exactly what that fucking clown wants and Eddie damn well knows it. Richie should know it, too, or he would if he was thinking clearly. Bev continues, “Richie, you can’t leave. Remember? Eddie already tried, and—”

“Yeah, I’ll take my chances,” Richie cuts her off, and he shoves past Eddie — which, _fucking_ ow, it’s not his bad shoulder but the movement still jostles it in a way that is decidedly _not_ pleasant — and starts marching up the stairs. “We’re all gonna die anyway if we stick around this fuckin’ place.”

_“Rich.”_

Eddie hears the way his own voice sounds, the desperation, the disbelief that Richie’s actually _leaving_ them when he thought— well, it doesn’t really matter what he thought, does it? Part of him wants to be embarrassed by it, but on the other hand, at least the sound of his voice manages to get a flinch out of Richie on his way up the stairs. Richie hesitates, hovering at the bend where that stupid fucking skateboard first appeared, and he squeezes his eyes shut for half a second like he’s bracing himself for something.

That something, evidently, being a painfully resigned, “Sorry, Eds,” before he continues unimpeded up toward his room.

“Seriously? Richie!”

No answer.

Ben mutters a curse under his breath, and he’s already preparing to jump and take the stairs two at a time to go after Richie before he’s stopped by a hand on his upper arm.

Stanley keeps his hand there. He’s staring, eyes hard and mouth set in a thin line, up at the top of the stairs where Richie just disappeared.

Ben asks, “Stan?”

“Just—” Stan begins to say, then cuts himself off and drops his hand. He sighs, scrubbing that hand over his face, and he says, “I got this.”

Eddie balks. “You _what?”_

But Stan’s already a quarter of the way up the stairs, and he calls back, “I _got_ this. Give us a minute, alright? He’ll freak out if we all go up there at once, you know that.”

“But Stan—”

“And can someone _please_ go after Bill and knock some sense into him before he gets himself killed?”

With that, Stanley’s already gone, leaving Ben and Bev and Frannie and Eddie all standing at the foot of the stairs with their heads reeling from how _unbelievably_ quickly everything just went to shit— or at least that’s how Eddie’s feeling, and he can’t imagine the rest of them are that far off.

“Damn it,” Eddie murmurs, pinching the bridge of his nose and barely holding back the urge to fucking _scream_ it. “Damn it. Okay. Okay. Which one of us is going after Bill?”

Even as he says it, turning to look at Ben and Bev, he already knows the answer. He knows they know it, too.

It has to be him. It would have had to be either him or Stan or Richie, one of the original four, someone who knew Bill before the clown, before that fucking summer, before Georgie, before the loss of his little brother imprinted itself in the back of his brain and became a central facet of his fucking psyche. It needed to be Stan, or it needed to be Richie, or it needed to be Eddie.

And now it’s gotta be him. Fuck.

He takes a breath to steady himself, then gets down on one knee to bring himself just below eye level with Frannie.

“Hey. Remember what I said in the car on the way up here? When I said you could come with me on this trip?”

Frannie worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and then recites, “Don’t leave your sight. Do everything you say when you say it, no buts.”

“Exactly,” Eddie says, his hands on her upper arms, gentle, running up and down. “I’m amending the rules, okay? I can do that, ‘cause I’m the one that made them. I have to go make sure Bill doesn’t get hurt. And while I’m gone, Ben and Bev are the ones you listen to. Got it? You don’t leave their sight for even a second. You do what they say, when they say it, no buts. I’m _counting_ on you, okay?” He lets go of her arm to cup the side of her face. “I need to know you’re gonna be okay while I’m gone, or I won’t be able to save Bill if he’s in trouble.”

Fran sniffs, sets her jaw, and nods. “Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“I won’t leave Ben and Beverly’s sight,” she says, her voice wobbling only a bit. “And I’ll do everything they say when they say it, no buts.”

“And hey, you keep an eye on them for me, too,” Eddie adds, tilting his head down to meet her eyes and offering her a little half smile. “They’re protecting you for me, but you can protect them, too, right? Don’t leave their sight, but don’t let _them_ leave _yours_ either.” He glances over her head at Ben, at Bev, both of whom are doing their best to give him an encouraging smile in return. “We’re all better off as a team. You know that.”

That, at least, knocks some of that crestfallen look off her face. She gives him a semi-reluctant, tight-lipped smile and whispers, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Eddie says, nodding, and before he can talk himself out of going at all, he straightens up and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Okay. I’ll be— I’ll be _right_ back, okay? I’ll get Bill and I’ll bring him back here, and Stan’s gonna talk some sense into Richie, and we’re all gonna be fine. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Eddie runs.

He fucking _hauls ass,_ huffing and puffing as his sneakers hit the pavement, jacket whipping behind him in the wind. The Derry Canal Days Festival is held every year in a big empty parking lot no more than three-quarters of a mile from the Derry Town House; way too short a distance to waste time calling an Uber, but _just_ long enough that it’s got his lungs burning by the time he’s halfway there. Three blocks east. Around the bend next to the old beaten down playground no one ever used even back in the eighties, much less now. Shortcut through a tiny stretch of woods at the end of a dead end cul-de-sac — _would Bill have known about that or did he go around, maybe I can beat him there_ — and across the storefront-lined Canal Street on the other side.

The Zipper is the first thing he sees, flashing blue and white bulbs against a gray overcast sky, horrifyingly rickety metal cars flipping and flopping some fifty, sixty feet in the air.

Fucking deathtrap is what it is. That and just about every other ride here.

Eddie skids to a halt just under the entrance archway, and there’s a veritable _sea_ of people swarming in front of him. Harried moms and dads grabbing for their kids’ hands, teenagers pushing and shoving at each other to get to whatever new shiny attraction’s drawn their attention, little kids bumping carelessly into strangers’ legs as they lick cotton candy off their fingers. There’s game tents and snack stands and food trucks, a ferris wheel creaking its way in a slow meandering circle, someone shouting about tickets and someone else shouting about prizes and all the rest of the voices blending together into an indistinct cacophony.

Eddie scans over the crowd, chest still heaving from his run, thinking _come on come on come on Bill where the fuck did you go,_ hoping to catch a flash of a green flannel fucking anywhere.

_There._

“Bill!”

Bill doesn’t hear him. He doesn’t hear him, not even when he yells for him a second time and a third, and now he’s—

“Oh, come on,” Eddie groans aloud. “Really, Bill?”

Eddie sees him weave around a close-pressed crowd of kids around a funnel cake stand, knock into a woman whose popcorn goes fucking flying, and then break into a sprint as soon as he has a clear path to run at the funhouse like his life depends on it. The funhouse. The goddamn motherfucking _funhouse,_ with its fucking entrance like the gaping maw of an actual literal clown with blood-red painted lips and soulless ceramic eyes.

“Yeah. Okay,” Eddie whispers to himself, jumping on the balls of his feet. “Okay. Fuck the clown. _Fuck_ the clown. You can do this, Eds.”

He ducks and weaves his way through the crowd, narrowly avoiding bowling over a teenage kid balancing a stack of funnel cakes in one hand, and he’s about halfway there when he looks up and sees Bill leap right past the ride operator like the guy’s not even there.

“Bill!” Eddie tries one more time. _“BILL!”_

Nope. Nothing. Eddie might as well be yelling at a brick wall.

Fuck, this is gonna suck.

He jogs up to the entrance, the wide gaping mouth of the clown looming over him, ready to swallow him up, and—

“Uh, buddy, you can’t go in there.”

Eddie stops short, blinking at the dude standing in front of him, a plain looking guy in a red cap and matching track jacket. His name tag says _Hi, my name is: Daniel_ with a smiling clown face next to it.

“I—” Eddie pants, more out of breath than he thought he was. “What?”

“You can’t go in there,” the guy, Daniel, repeats. “Kids only, man.”

“What? But—” Eddie gestures with a flailing wave at the entrance, where Bill definitely just charged in past him. “What about him?”

“Yeah, he got in too fast for me to friggin’ stop him,” Daniel huffs, “and security’s on their way, but I’m not about to go letting every Dick, Joe, and Larry in the funhouse ‘cause one guy doesn’t know how to read the rules.”

Eddie’s mouth hangs open, his mind racing, eyes moving from Daniel to the funhouse entrance and back. After about three seconds he just shakes his head and, somehow, pulls a lie right out of his ass.

“Look, I don’t care about whoever that guy is, but my kid’s in there,” Eddie says, nodding at the funhouse, eyes catching on the sign posted next to the door. YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE just above a list of people who shouldn’t enter the funhouse at all because of this or that preexisting medical condition. “She— she gets seizures. From the, uh, the lights? I told her not to go in, but you know.” He shrugs, helplessly, dropping his arms to his sides. “Kids.”

Daniel’s eyebrows lift. “Shit, really?”

“Yeah,” Eddie breathes. “Fucking really, now can I—?”

He doesn’t even wait for Daniel to answer; the hesitance was enough, that’s all Eddie really needed, so he shoves past him and jumps up, directly into the clown’s mouth.

 _Yeah, okay,_ he thinks, stumbling down the churning tube that makes up the first step of the funhouse, listening to the fading sounds of the festival at his back, screaming kids and Daniel yelling after him.

_This is definitely gonna suck._

As soon as he’s out of the tube and he gets his bearings, he cups his hands around his mouth and screams into the next room, _“BILL!”_

Nothing. Even the sounds of the festival are gone, just the eerie groan of the funhouse machinery churning in the walls, and the faintest hint of—

— a laugh.

Fuck. _Fuck._ Eddie’s heart crawls its way up into his throat, fists clenching and unclenching, his eyes on the next room with its blacklight-blue walls and its dozen hanging clown dolls swinging like fucking pendulums. The laugh reverberates through the walls, through the floor, through the soles of his shoes, and Eddie takes a breath to steady himself, gives himself a second to look around and take stock of his surroundings in the bend before the blacklight room.

 _These things are death traps,_ he thinks, searching, knowing it’s gotta be around here somewhere—

“Ah-ha,” he says out loud when he finds it. It’s a few feet back — he’d nearly run right past it — but there, just after the spinning tube, there’s a darkened opening where one section of the funhouse wall gives way to another, and behind it, the barely-there light glints off the top of the shiny red fire extinguisher sitting pretty and waiting for him.

It’s not much in the way of a weapon, but hell, Eddie’ll take a nice heavy blunt object over nothing.

One last steadying breath to prepare himself, and then he scoops up the fire extinguisher and just goes. One foot in front of the other. _Don’t let yourself think about it, don’t give yourself time to chicken out, just go._

He makes it past the swinging clowns without getting knocked on his ass even once, thank you very much, ducking and weaving like a goddamn expert, and he strides up and out of the blacklight room—

— only to smack face first into a window.

“God _damn_ it, mother fucking bullshit _fucking_ haunted ass town—”

Of course it’s a mirror maze, he thinks, prodding at his nose where he definitely bruised it against the window. Of course it is. Why the fuck wouldn’t it be. He looks up, squinting against the relentless fucking strobe lights and the endless columns of mirrors and halls laid out in front of him. There’s a flash of movement at the far end of the hall in front of him, the briefest glimpse of a flannel, and then:

_“KID!”_

“Fuck,” Eddie mutters. He doesn’t see him anymore. “Bill? Bill!”

_“Kid, wait!”_

Eddie cautiously steps forward, feeling his way around the maze one-handed. “Bill! Bill, come on, where are you, man?”

The creaking of carnival machinery is all he can hear at first, that and the shuffling of steps and the sound of what _must_ be Bill smacking into one of the hundred thousand mirrors around them. Or the kid, Eddie guesses. There’s also the faint mechanical laughter of a fake clown echoing through the maze, which, awesome, _that’s_ exactly what this place fucking needs.

And when that laughter gets a little less mechanical, a little more _organic,_ Eddie grits his teeth and tightens his grip on the fire extinguisher.

Fuck the clown. Fuck the clown and fuck the leper and fuck Derry and fuck the shitty Canal Days Festical.

Fuck all of it.

He’s not scared. He’s not. He’s here to find Bill and stop him from playing right into the fucking clown’s hands and then they’re both getting the hell out of here, and they’re gonna kill it, and he is not scared.

The laughter deepens, builds in a crescendo until it’s all he can hear, and then—

_“Ooh, he’s not scared, no, no, no, not scared at all…”_

“Fuck,” Eddie whispers, squeezing his eyes shut.

_“… oh, ho, ho, little baby Eddie-bear…”_

“It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not—”

_“... all grown up, isn’t he, little baby Edsie is such a big boy now, he doesn’t believe anymore, no…”_

The voice fades in and out, the clown’s deep fucked-up joyful baritone overlaid with another voice that Eddie recognizes instantly, and it sends a bolt of dread through him as he cowers back against a mirror.

When he finally opens his eyes, it’s not the clown standing in the mirror in front of him.

It’s his mother.

Not as he last saw her, not laid out in a hospital bed, exhausted and weak from the months she spent bedridden from a particularly bad heart attack, no. Instead she looks like she did back then, back when they still lived in Derry, tall and imposing and _big_ in so many senses of the term, fucking _encompassing._ Distantly, Eddie realizes she can’t be more than a decade older than him at this age, but Christ, it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way.

He might as well be thirteen, twelve, nine, a fucking _toddler._

His mother cocks her head to the side, frowning at him.

_“What are you looking for, Eddie-bear?”_

Eddie can’t answer. His heart’s in his fucking throat.

_“Eddie. What are you looking for?”_

“I— I don’t—” Eddie gulps, pressing himself more firmly back against the mirror.

His mother’s upper lip pulls back in a scowl, and slowly, oh so slowly, she starts to change.

 _“Oh, Eddie-bear, you know I was only trying to protect you, don’t you?”_ she asks as her hair begins to gray, thinning out at the edges.

 _“You were always such a foolish boy, so delicate,”_ she says as her cheeks hollow out, as bags form under her eyes.

 _“You needed to be protected, you never understood that, you never will,”_ she says, and by now she’s dropped sixty, seventy, eighty pounds, too much skin sagging off of brittle cheekbones, too pale and wan and looking more like she did in her casket than she ever did in life. _“You were sick, Eddie, you are sick, you know you are, you can feel it, you could always feel that there’s something rotten inside you something that you’ll never be able to claw out it’s always going to be there Eddie festering and molding and decaying you know y_ ** _ou’re so so sick inside Eddie you KNOW—”_ **

The butt of the fire extinguisher smacks into the center of his dead mother’s face, shattering a spider-web of cracks into the window, and she’s gone. Her voice drops away to nothing, as does the clown’s, nothing but Eddie’s heaving breath and the fading cackle of mechanical laughter.

“Fuck,” Eddie whispers, shaking, lowering the fire extinguisher and eyeing up the crack. “Fuck.”

Before he can dwell on it, though, he hears another voice.

“Kid! Hey, kid, wait—!”

“Shit, _Bill,”_ Eddie huffs, shaking his head and feeling his way through the mirror maze again and trying his best to put his mother as far out of his mind as he can. Because he can hear Bill so much more clearly now, his hurried shuffling footsteps, his hands slapping against the windows and mirrors.

_Thunk, thunk, thunk._

And then, finally, Eddie finds him. He sees a kaleidoscope image of a dozen Bills rushing forward, smacking face first into a window and groaning, hunching over to cover his face with one hand.

“Bill! Hey!” Eddie shouts, reaching out and laying his palm flat against the window in front of him. “Bill, it’s me! BILL!”

He smacks his palm against the glass, over and over and over again, then beats his fist against it. He’s about eighty percent sure he knows which of these Bills is the real deal, and if he’s right, then there can’t be, what, more than two or three sets of windows standing between them, _if_ that? Can Bill really not hear him?

“BILL!”

Eddie curses under his breath, giving up on that route. He keeps an eye on Bill — not difficult, when there’s so fucking many of him — and feels his way further through the maze. The kaleidoscope fractal view of his surroundings keeps shifting and bending as he moves.

“H- hey,” he hears Bill saying now, and Eddie glances up with a surge of hope, only to see that Bill’s not looking in his direction at all. Instead, he’s looking down at a kid, _the_ kid Eddie can only guess, a kid that’s staring up at Bill like he’s lost his fucking mind. Or he might be staring at Bill, anyway. It’s hard to tell when he’s repeated a dozen-dozen times in the mirrors all around them.

Eddie frowns, forehead creasing as he tilts his head to the side. He can’t… focus on the kid, for some reason. Looking directly at him makes Eddie’s brain so fuzzy, but looking at him in his peripheral seems to be okay.

Then he takes a step, and—

The kid’s gone. Every iteration of him on the infinite mirrors disappears, but Bill doesn’t seem to notice.

“No, I’m here to h- heh- _help,”_ Bill says, and Eddie takes another step, this time to the right instead of forward, and the kid reappears. A little four-foot something scrap of a kid in a denim jacket, maybe eight, maybe nine. Eddie watches, turns his head to the right and the kid’s gone, then he turns his head to the left and the kid’s right back where he was. It’s like one of those billboards that shows one image from one angle and something totally different from the other.

“What the fuck,” Eddie whispers, turning his head back and forth. Kid, no kid, kid, no kid.

“Stop fol… ing me!” the kid yells at Bill, his voice fading out exactly when Eddie turns his head to the right and can no longer see him, then back again when he turns his head to the left.

“I’m gonna,” Bill stammers, pointing in a vague circle that Eddie takes as meaning _I’m gonna circle around and get to you somehow,_ and he backs up a step. “I’m gonna g- get you outta h- h…”

Bill trails off, never finishing his sentence, and Eddie immediately knows why.

He sees it.

He sees _It,_ reflected in the mirrors and the windows a hundred, a hundred thousand times. He sees the clown exactly as he remembers it from all those decades ago, not the leper, not the fucked up zombified version of his mother, but the _clown,_ in all it’s white-painted frilled orange pom-pommed glory.

It’s got its tongue out, sliding up the window an inch at a time with a sickening drawn out squeak, dripping saliva down the glass.

“N- No,” Bill says, shaking his head, and he plants both palms on the glass in front of him. “No, no, _please.”_

Eddie turns his head to the right. The kid’s gone. He turns his head to the left, and the kid’s there, staring wide-eyed and terrified up at the clown and its dripping lolling tongue and its teeth and its bulging golden yellow eyes.

The clown gets up to its full height, flicking its too-long tongue back into its mouth and snapping its head back.

“No,” Bill says, shaking his head again, his jaw shaking the way it does when he’s struggling to get the next syllable out, and it’s then that Eddie realizes he’s crying. Bill is— he’s _crying,_ and something in Eddie’s chest shrivels up and sinks into his stomach at the sight of it. Bill’s got one hand flat against the glass, pointing at the center of his own chest with the other. “Please, I- I’m here this time, just take me—”

The clown tips backward, blood red smile splitting across its face, and—

_THUNK._

“No,” Bill says again, in between one beat of the clown’s head against the glass and the other.

The clown laughs, deep in its throat.

The kid screams, pressing back against the window that Bill’s trying his damn hardest to beat through with his fists.

“No, no, you _son_ of a bitch—”

_THUNK._

_THUNK._

_THUNK._

Eddie grits his teeth.

“You son of a— _bitch!”_ Bill cries, slamming his shoulder into the glass, throwing his whole weight into it. “No! No, _fuck,_ please—!”

Every image of the clown rears back, slams its head into the glass a fifth, sixth, seventh time. All at once in a million mirrors all around Eddie, a thin crack ripples out from the point of impact.

_THUNK. THUNK. THUNK._

Eddie takes a breath, eyes sweeping over the hundreds of reflections of Bill and the hundreds of thousands of reflections of the clown, all around him, and he hones the fuck in. He listens to his gut. Because in forty fucking years, he has always trusted his gut about one thing and one thing only, and that was how to get from Point A to Point B. In forty fucking years, he may not have always known what he was and what he wanted to be, he might not have known _who_ he was and who he wanted to be, but he has always, _always_ known where. He has never been wrong about that.

_THUNK. THUNK. THUNK. THUNK THUNK THUNKTHUNKTHUNK_

“Son of a—” Bill steps back, resorts to slamming the heel of his shoe into the glass, frantically kicking at it, tears streaming down his cheeks as the kid screams again. “N- no, come on, _fuck—!”_

Eddie rears back, lifts the fire extinguisher over his head, and drives it into the window to his right with every ounce of strength he’s got in him.

The glass fucking shatters.

It falls apart in a rain of shards, and—

And the clown’s there. It’s right fucking in front of him, facing Bill on Eddie’s left, but at the sound of the glass shattering it turns, golden yellow eyes on him.

Its mouth is hanging slack, eyes wide, but then it _smiles,_ all sharp teeth and bloody lips splitting its face damn near in half just like Patrick Hockstetter’s, and it laughs.

_“Oh, ho, ho, hee hee! Oh, Eddie-bear, so g_ **_ood of you to join us—”_ **

“FUCK! YOU!”

Eddie pulls the pin.

There’s a beat of silence while the clown, apparently, realizes what he’s about to do, and then Eddie aims and squeezes. _Pull-aim-squeeze-sweep, asshole._ There’s a rush of white foam that blasts out of the extinguisher's cone like a goddamn fire hose, and Eddie lurches forward, aiming the jet at the clown’s face, marching forward a step at a time.

 _“FUCK! YOU!”_ Eddie screams again. _“I’M NOT FUCKING AFRAID OF YOU, ASSHOLE!”_

It’s a lie, technically. And the clown must know it, too, because against all logic, it starts laughing again. It laughs and laughs and laughs, in open defiance of the roar of sodium bicarbonate foam rushing from the extinguisher and splattering all over it and all over the walls. It laughs and laughs, and its laugh fades out, but not like the clown’s actually _stopped,_ just like—

Fuck, like it’s getting farther away.

Eddie lowers the fire extinguisher just as the laughter fades away to nothing, his own chest heaving, his heart hammering like a set of bongo drums in his brain, his hands shaking.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “Bill?”

He turns, finds Bill standing in front of him with both palms flat on the glass, staring at him with his eyes wide and his jaw hanging open.

“E- Eddie?”

“Back up,” Eddie tells him, and again when he doesn’t listen right away, “Bill, back the fuck up!”

Bill backs up. Eddie lifts up the extinguisher again and smashes it into the window. It’s lost a fair bit of weight now that its contents are splattered all over the walls and windows and mirrors, so Eddie has to really throw his back into it and ignore the slicing pain through his left shoulder, but he manages after four or five tries. The glass cracks, then cracks some more, and finally shatters like the last one did.

“Come on,” Eddie says, panting, gesturing toward where he knows the exit must be.

“But— b- but the _kid—”_

“Bill, there is no kid!” Eddie all but screams, reaching out and grabbing him by the front of his flannel and shaking him. “That’s what it does! That’s what it does, it fucks with you, with your head. Now _come_ on!”

It’s a slow, fumbling escape, the two of them making their way out of the mirror maze with Eddie’s fist tight on Bill’s sleeve. But with Eddie leading the way, it only takes them a few minutes to finally break out into the exit and into the passageway that leads to the next portion of the funhouse — a set of stairs that leads up into who knows what kind of new horror — and Eddie takes them left and out through the emergency exit instead.

“Fuck, I never thought I’d be so happy to smell fucking… gasoline and funnel cake,” Eddie pants, glancing down at the spent fire extinguisher and tossing it aside. It rolls across the asphalt and underneath a food truck, and Eddie does not have the wherewithal to give a shit. “Come on.”

“E- Eddie, I— I can’t— he—”

“Bill, for fuck’s sake,” Eddie says, turning and gripping him by the upper arms. The sun somehow found the time to set while they were stuck in the funhouse, and in the flashing carnival lights Bill looks both too pale and like a sickly rainbow mishmash of too much color. His eyes are still shining.

 _I’m here this time,_ his voice rings in Eddie’s head.

_Please._

_I’m here this time, just take me._

“Bill,” he starts, but Bill’s way ahead of him.

“I can’t— I can’t let It kill another kid, Eddie, I- I cah- can’t. I can’t let that h- ha- happen to anyone else.”

“I know,” Eddie cuts him off, and his voice comes out gentler than he thought it would. “Come on, hey, of course I know. You think I want to let it get any more kids? Of course I don’t. But it’s not gonna be like last time, Bill. We’re gonna kill it. Remember?”

“But— b- but the kid, he—”

“Bill, there _was_ no kid,” Eddie repeats, giving him a firm but gentle shake. “There was no kid. Not in that mirror maze, maybe not ever in the first place, I don’t fucking know. But that’s— that’s what it _does,_ it fucks with our heads. You know that. It knew that _that_ was the best way to fuck with you, it knew, because of…”

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence, because, well, there’s literally only one way that sentence could possibly end, and both he and Bill know it.

Bill looks away, sniffs, scrubs the heel of his hand across one cheek and then the other. He opens his mouth and shuts it and opens it again, his jaw shaking like before, like he’s struggling to get the words past a block in his throat. The corner of his mouth twitches like he means to smile and fails at it.

“He w- would’ve b- b- been in his thirties by now, Eddie.”

Again, that strange something in Eddie’s chest shrivels up and shrinks down into his stomach, and he gulps, tugging Bill forward until he’s got an arm around his shoulders and another tight around his waist. Bill goes tense for half a second before he just… crumbles, and then they’re two grown men clinging to each other for dear life outside the funhouse of a fucking carnival while Eddie tries to stop shaking like a leaf and Bill sobs into his shoulder.

Twenty-seven years ago, Eddie held Bill sort of like this, clinging along with the rest of their best friends on the floor of that cistern under Neibolt. He didn’t say anything then, because he couldn’t think of a single fucking thing to say at all, and he doesn’t say anything now.

Bill does, though.

“I— I— _fuck,_ I didn’t remember him,” Bill whispers between gasping sobs. “I mean, I r- remembered him, but I didn’t— I didn’t f- _feel_ it, and now I… I miss him. Eddie, I _miss_ him. So much.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, because what the fuck else is he supposed to say? “I’m sorry, Bill.”

“I’m— I’m not,” Bill croaks, pulling away and shaking his head, one hand still gripping Eddie’s shoulder. “I’m not,” he says again, like he’s just realizing it, or like trying to convince himself. “‘Cause it f- f- fuh- _fuck,_ it _fucking_ sucks, and it _hurts,_ but I… I’d rather remember? I don’t w- wanna forget again. You know?”

Eddie hesitates, then admits, “Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think I do.”

Bill sniffs again, nodding, visibly trying to pull himself together. There’s an almost admirable lack of awkwardness about it, Eddie thinks, a willingness to own the fact that he just broke down sobbing in front of an entire festival full of people, rather than shy away from it.

“Is, uh— is everyone else…?”

“Back at the town house, yeah,” Eddie nods. He tilts his head, rolls his eyes. “Well, unless Stan didn’t manage to stop Richie from trying to skip town, then yeah. They should be. We were all about to head to Mike’s and figure out what the fuck we’re doing, so… I dunno, I guess that’s still the plan? Probably?”

“We’re gonna kill It,” Bill says, nodding, and he says it with a whole lot more conviction than Eddie would have expected from a man who just got done sobbing into his friend’s shoulder. “We’re gonna kill It for real this time. For good.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Eddie agrees as they start making their way out of the festival, side by side. “Soon as we can figure out fucking _how.”_

“We’ll figure it out,” Bill says, shrugging. “We will. Long as we’re together.”

And the funny thing is, Eddie actually kind of believes that. There’s something about the seven of them, lucky number seven all brought together, a circle of cut palms in the Maine summer grass, that makes him feel like they’ve actually got half a shot at this.

His phone buzzes as they pass under the festival’s entrance archway, and he wakes the screen to see a text from Richie.

_I am still alive, btw._

It buzzes immediately again, this time with a new text:

_Sorry for the freak out._

Eddie huffs a laugh, shaking his head, getting ready to swipe open his messages and send him either a _yeah, no shit you’re still alive, asshole,_ or an _it’s cool, this shit sucks and it’s scary, I get it man,_ or maybe a message that falls somewhere in the middle. A good old fashioned middle finger emoji.

But before he can, his phone lights up with an incoming call, and he picks it up before it’s even done the first ring.

“Hey, honey,” he says. “Don’t worry, I’m on my way back to—”

_“Dad?”_

Eddie stops in his tracks.

A cold spike wedges itself in the space between his ribs, turns every single ounce of blood in his veins to ice at the sound of Frannie’s voice sounding so scared. It takes him a second to get his voice back in working order, and before he can, there’s another voice from the other end of the line.

_“Ooh, hoo, hoo, hee, hee, hee—”_

_“Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t listen, I didn’t—”_

_“— Eddie’s a big boy now, but he brou **ght a new little baby Kaspbrak, just for me, yes sirree—”**_

“Fran, honey,” Eddie cuts in. “Where are you?”

Bill’s staring at him with a furrow between his brows, but Eddie can barely see him past the tears building in his own eyes.

“Frannie. Where are you?”

_“I— I’m sorry, Dad, I shouldn’t’ve—”_

“Sweetheart, listen to me,” Eddie manages to say through a sob. “Listen to me, it’s okay. I’m not mad. Please, just tell me where you are, and—”

 _“Ooh, hee hee! Stupid little brave thing, just like her stupid little brave Daddy, isn’t she? She needs to be_ **_protected,_ ** _Eddie, she doesn’t_ **_understand,_ ** _Eddie!”_

“Frannie, honey, it’s okay, just tell me where you—”

_“Daddy, I’m sorry, I don’t know—”_

_“Oh, but_ **_you_ ** _do know where, don’t you Eddie? You know where, you always know where, so why don’t you come down here and play with us? Come down and pl_ ** _ay with your favorite clown and silly brave little Frannie, we’ll both wait here for you, and then we can all float together, hee hee hee! You and me and all the other losers, we’ll all fLOAT TOGETHER—”_ **

The line goes dead, and Eddie stares at the screen with… he doesn’t even know what it is, this thing that’s seizing at his lungs, that’s numbing his every muscle, that’s blanking out all his thoughts and replacing it with static.

This is…

This is a new kind of fear.

“Eddie?”

“I have to go,” Eddie finds himself saying, grip tightening on his phone. His voice sounds smaller than he’s ever heard it, foreign to his own ears. “I have to go.”

Bill reaches out for him, but he flinches back, shaking his head.

“I have to go.”

“Eddie, c- come back to the town house,” Bill pleads with him. “We’ll all go together.”

Eddie shakes his head. He’s already backing away, out of Bill’s reach, preparing to run. “No time,” he says. “There’s no… There’s no _fucking_ time, Bill, just… You go back. Go back, get the others. But I— I have to go to that house. I have to go right fucking now.”

 _“What?”_ Bill asks, eyes wide. “Eddie—”

“I have to _go.”_

Then Eddie turns on his heel, and he runs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings** for this chapter: unreality, disorientation, Richie's anxieties being steeped in internalized homophobia even though he never actually says it, mentions of parental abuse (both Eddie's and Bev's), shameless overuse of italics, and you know, the Clown

“What’s your favorite Blow Pop flavor?”

The kid’s voice jerks Richie out of a daze, and he looks up from where he’s sitting on the couch to see all four-foot-something of her standing right in front of him. Perfectly innocent look on her face. Familiar big brown eyes on him, eyebrows up, a big bag of candy weighing heavy in her arms. Behind her, in the town house bar, he can just barely make out Stan and Bev and Ben debating their next move — when they’re all gonna give up and go after Eddie and Bill if they don’t show back up on their own, what to do once they’re all together, whether to go meet up at Mike’s or have him come here, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda. Richie has long since decided he is not making any of those decisions anyway, fuck it.

They’re lucky he’s still goddamn _here._

“Uh,” Richie clears his throat, because the kid’s still standing in front of him, waiting. “Hi?”

“Hi,” Frannie says. “What’s your favorite Blow Pop flavor?”

Richie glances down at the bag in her arms, then back up at her face. He straightens up and tries his best to look like he _didn’t_ just get done crying a whole thirty seconds before wandering back down to mope on the lounge couch— as pointless as that is, since they all must have heard him screaming at Stan from all the way down here when he lost his shit, including the kid.

Still. The point’s a little moot, but a guy’s gotta preserve his dignity _somehow._

“Uh,” he clears his throat again. “What’re my options? Lay ‘em on me.”

“Blue raspberry, cherry, watermelon, strawberry, sour apple, and grape.”

“Sour apple,” Richie answers. “Anyone who says cherry is a cop.”

Frannie’s eyebrows go through a painfully familiar movement. Her nose wrinkles, and the tiniest little inkling of a smile shows up on only one side of her face. It’s a famous Kaspbrak expression, or at least it is to Richie, and she says, “You’re a little weird.”

“No shit,” Richie answers on impulse, then winces. “Er— shit, sorry, don’t repeat that.”

For some reason that gets her to smile for real, and then she digs her arm into the bag and pulls out a green apple flavored Blow Pop. She hands it over and then grabs a blue raspberry for herself, and then she climbs up onto the couch to sit beside him, and they unwrap their lollipops in a comfortable silence.

All told, the kid makes it a whopping three minutes before she breaks it. Not bad, Richie thinks.

“So.”

Richie pops the lollipop out of his mouth. “So.”

“How come you wanted to leave?”

Damn it. He was expecting, or at least hoping, that she was just gonna ask him to confirm that he was not, in fact, planning on leaving anymore. _Christ, I gotta hand it to you, Eds, she really gets right to the point, huh? No bullshit from this kid, that’s for fuckin’ sure._ Richie rolls the lollipop around in his mouth, from one cheek to the other and back, thinking, and then he quietly admits, “Just got scared, I guess.”

“Yeah, duh.”

He half turns, raises an eyebrow down at her, and parrots, “Yeah, duh?”

“Uh, _yeah._ Duh. It’s a monster that makes you see stuff you’re afraid of. Everybody’s getting scared.”

Richie hesitates for a second, pulls the lollipop out of his mouth, fidgets with it, and puts it back in his mouth. He thinks of Stan, all infuriatingly fucking calm and stern, and how he’d made essentially the exact same point.

_We’re all fucking terrified, Rich._

“Yeah,” Richie murmurs around the lollipop, because it was one thing to scream it in Stan’s face, but how in the fuck do you explain to a nine-year-old that the thing you’re afraid of isn’t the same as what everyone else is afraid of? How in the fuck do you explain to a nine-year-old that the thing you’re afraid of is _inside_ you and has been for your whole goddamn life? How in the fuck do you explain to a nine-year-old what this— this _thing_ is, this thing with claws and teeth that sits curled up and growling right above your diaphram, this awful fucking thing and its constant low-level ache that you haven’t been able to shake off for longer than you can remember?

Frannie doesn’t ask him to elaborate. She looks up at him, her eyebrows pinched in the middle, and asks, “Are you still scared?”

At least that’s an easy answer. “Yep.”

“But you’re not gonna leave anymore.”

“Nah,” Richie tells her, shaking his head. “Nah, I’m sticking around. You’re not getting rid of me that easy, kid.”

She frowns. “I didn’t want to get rid of you.”

“Aw, really?” Richie asks, finally managing a real smile, even if it’s a teasing one. “Grew on ya that quick, did I?”

Frannie nods without a single hint of irony. “Yeah. You’re kind of weird, but I dunno, it’s like… a good kind of weird most of the time, I guess? And you’re really tall and you have a metal baseball bat, so it’ll be easier to fight the monster if you’re around, and my dad was _really_ upset when you said you were leaving, so he’ll be happy you’re not, too.”

Richie hums around the lollipop. “He was really upset, huh? You think so?”

“Yeah, I do,” she says, in a very self-assured tone that says _how dare you question me,_ “because I’d be really upset if Charlotte — that’s my best friend, her name’s Charlotte — I’d be really upset if we were trying to do something scary together and _she_ ran away ‘cause she got scared. And I’d be really happy if she didn’t leave ‘cause it’s easier to do scary things when you have your best friend with you, and Dad said you were _his_ best friend, so.”

She shrugs, pops the lollipop back in her mouth.

Richie blinks. “I— yeah?”

“Mm-hmm.”

For some reason, the next words out of Richie’s mouth aren’t, _Really? He said that?_ And the next words out of his mouth aren’t, _But are you sure? The guy hasn’t seen me in twenty-seven fucking years, you’re sure that’s what he said?_ And the next words out of his mouth aren’t even, _Yeah, I think he’s my best friend, too,_ despite the fact that he kind of feels that it might be true. Is true, really, there’s no “kind of” or “might be” about it. Somehow.

No, instead, the next words out of his mouth are:

“What else did he say about me?”

Frannie shrugs again. “Just that you used to almost break all your arms and legs trying to climb up to his window a bunch of times. And he said I can’t watch your stand-up show because TV-MA is the TV version of R.”

Richie sputters a laugh. “Yeah, no, he definitely made the right call there.”

She rolls her eyes, and he can’t help it — he reaches over and ruffles her hair, earning a smack to his forearm. She groans, all melodramatic as she sags back against the couch. “You guys are like, the _same_ person sometimes. Jeez. Have you ever even made a braid before? Do you know how hard it is? It takes forever to do it yourself ‘cause you have to hold your arms up behind your head the whole time, and if you or my dad mess it up like that then I have to undo the whole thing and do it _all_ over again.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!” Frannie yells, throwing her hands up, and she immediately launches into an impromptu lecture about how to take care of hair that’s as long as hers — peppered, apparently, with extra advice she’s only recently learned from Bev — and how she couldn’t _possibly_ expect him to understand because his hair is so much shorter than hers, and how her dad understands even less because his hair is _super_ short, and…

And Richie sits back and watches, taking extra care to make sure his smile stays politely interested and doesn’t tip over into _too_ amused.

 _God, she’s just like you, Eds,_ he thinks, glancing down at his phone sitting face-up on the couch armrest. In the other room he can still hear the others. The roll of a glass across the bartop. Ben on the phone, it sounds like, probably talking to Mike.

He wakes the screen, opens up his texts to Eddie — all five of them, the initial _“This is Eddie,”_ Richie’s answering _“new phone who dis,”_ and Eddie’s middle finger emoji. The last two, the two messages he left unanswered, glare up at him like an accusatory fucking beacon, so Richie heaves a sigh and types up a quick response one-handed, glancing up at Frannie every couple seconds so she knows he’s still (mostly) listening.

 _I am still alive, btw,_ he says first, because that’ll piss Eddie off in a way that’s a little too hard to resist. Then, more seriously:

_Sorry for the freak out._

He leaves it at that. He’ll give an actual explanation, eventually, maybe, if Eddie asks him for one. Assuming they all live long enough for that.

Fuck it, if by some miracle they live through his shitstorm, he’ll tell _all_ of them.

 _You hear that? You there, God? It’s me, Richie,_ he thinks with more than a little sarcasm. _Throw me a clown killing miracle, would ya? Pinky promise I’ll stop being a piece of shit for like, at least a few days. Maybe I’ll even sack up and come out, I guess._

But that thought sends his stomach fucking somersaulting, so then again, maybe not. Who knows.

By now Frannie’s dropped into silence, apparently content to devote most of her attention to her Blow Pop instead of lecturing Richie on proper hair braiding protocol. She pulls it out of her mouth so it _pops,_ then holds it up to her eye level and inspects it with narrowed eyes, tilting her head. By Richie’s estimation, she’s about halfway down to the bubble gum at the center. More than halfway, if she does it like him and bites through the candy shell when it gets thin enough.

Then she asks, apropos of nothing, “What if you’re not scared of anything?”

Richie blinks. “Huh?”

“If you’re not scared of anything,” Frannie asks, staring at her lollipop, “what would the monster turn into?”

“Uh. I don’t…” Richie sputters, shakes his head. “I mean, I don’t think anyone’s not afraid of anything.”

“No, my friend Colin isn’t afraid of anything,” Frannie tells him, sagely, as if it’s a plain fact that some nine-year-old kid named Colin is the single most fearless human being on Earth. “Like, he’s not afraid of rats or bees or sharks or heart attacks or _anything._ He’s not even afraid of the dark.”

Richie gives her a half smile. “Hate to break it to you, kiddo, but he’s bullshitting you.”

She frowns. “You don’t _know_ that.”

“I do, ‘cause everyone’s afraid of something,” Richie shrugs. “Tell you what, he’s probably afraid of something _crazy_ embarrassing. Probably just says he’s not afraid of anything so no one figures it out.”

She gives a frustrated sigh and rolls her eyes again. “Okay, but _if_ you weren’t afraid of anything.”

“Hypothetically?”

“Yeah. If you weren’t afraid of anything, then wouldn’t the monster not have anything to turn into?”

“I, uh… I don’t know,” Richie admits.

“Maybe it would just go away,” Frannie offers, “if it couldn’t figure out what to turn into.”

Richie opens his mouth, then shuts it, pulling back from the knee-jerk response of _I fucking wish, kiddo,_ and instead he gives it a minute of genuine thought. If he’s being honest, though, he seriously fucking doubts that something as simple as “not being afraid” would be enough to wipe the clown out of existence— however helpful it might’ve been, way back when, to _act_ like they weren’t afraid. Saying _now I’m gonna have to kill this fucking clown_ had made it easier, in retrospect. It had made the damn thing shrink back enough that the rest of them got a chance to really wail on it. It had made Richie feel bigger, at the time. It had made the clown feel smaller.

But at the end of the day, the clown is still a thing. It’s an actual physical thing with claws and teeth — the _real_ kind of claws and teeth. It’s not an idea that’ll just go away because a couple of dumbfuck forty-year-olds decide not to think about it.

Richie opens his mouth to give the kid some bullshit wishy-washy answer, but he’s interrupted by the front door of the town house slamming open.

And he does mean _slamming_ open.

“Jesus _Christ,_ man,” Richie calls out, twisting at the waist so he can see through the archway that leads into the main lobby-slash-foyer. “Scare the shit out of me, why don’t—?”

At roughly the same instant that the door hits the opposite wall with, likely, enough force to crack the moulding, Bill comes barreling into the lounge with all the grace of a five-foot-seven staggering bull, out of breath and sweating.

And he’s _not with Eddie._

“G- Guys, we have to…”

Bill stops short, standing in the archway and leaning over with one hand against the wall, eyes wide— but not on Richie, who’s staring at him with a stone in his gut and with a look on his face that probably makes it seem like he thinks Bill’s gone and grown a second head.

He’s not staring at Richie; he’s staring at _Frannie._

“Uh,” comes Ben’s voice, as he and Bev and Stan come poking their heads out of the hotel bar to investigate the noise. “Bill? You okay?”

“Bill,” Bev asks, with the inklings of the same dread that Richie’s already feeling. “Where’s Eddie?”

“Sh- shit,” Bill breathes.

Stan asks, “Bill?”

“It— It tricked him,” Bill tells them. “It fucking— It _tricked_ him. Shit.”

“Bill,” Stanley says, carefully even. “What do you mean? Where

_the fuck is this place?_

Eddie is…

… somewhere, he thinks.

Maybe. He must be, right?

Fuck. He doesn’t know. Maybe he’s everywhere.

Everywhere, or nowhere, or… fuck, he really, really doesn’t know.

There are stars, though. Which is familiar, sort of.

Not so much from the city but from… before.

Home.

Billions and billions and trillions of stars everywhere he looks, up and down and all around and— God, Jesus fucking Christ, is he in _space?_ If he’s in fucking space he’s gonna be so pissed, but wherever he is, whether this is everywhere or nowhere or if he’s lost in space or he’s standing alone in an open field in Maine in the middle of the night, he feels…

Almost normal.

Content? Maybe.

Definitely… safe, somehow.

The flurry of stars twists and churns around him, sliding past like one of those… what’s it called, a time-lapse? Yeah, that sounds right, even though Eddie can’t quite remember, but it’s all moving, not exactly quickly but damn well faster than it should be, and—

And there’s a shape in there somewhere, a massive black shape blotting out the stars.

HELLO, EDDIE.

The shape’s voice rings out from the center of his own head.

IT’S ABOUT TIME WE SPOKE.

“Is that… Is that what we’re doing right now? Speaking?”

YES. A SHAME IT’S UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES.

Eddie gulps.

Under these circumstances?

“Am I dead?”

There’s a rumble. A low hum. A sigh?

NO, the shape tells him.

YOU ARE NOT DEAD.

BUT YOU ARE NOT SAFE.

“I… I feel safe, though.”

YES.

THAT IS THE BEST I COULD DO FOR NOW.

BUT IT WILL NOT LAST.

“What? What the

hell do you mean, It tricked him?”

Stan’s voice is almost perfectly level, only the barest hint of a waver at the end of the question, which is just all the more fucking noticeable next to Bill’s nonstop frantic pacing and the feeling of ice crawling its way through Richie’s veins.

“He… He was on the phone,” Bill explains, gesticulating with shaky hands. “He was on the phone w- with— with Frannie, or I _thought_ he was, and then…”

“It made him think It had her,” Bev realizes aloud. “It made him think It had Frannie.”

Bill gulps — Richie can see it — and he shoots a furtive glance at the kid before looking back at the rest of them and nodding.

“Yeah. I th- think so. He… he said he was going to the house.”

Ben’s not looking at any of them when he breathes, “Neibolt.”

“He went to fucking _Neibolt,”_ Richie clarifies. “On his _own.”_

Stan curses under his breath, ducking his head down and pinching the bridge of his nose. Bev covers her mouth with both hands. There are already tears on her lower lashes, just barely visible because she’s come to stand so close to where Richie’s currently standing and feeling some bizarre out-of-body calm even though, again, all the blood in his body has apparently been replaced with fucking ice water.

The silence hangs, unbearably thick for the half a second it lasts, before the kid breaks it.

“Did the monster get him?”

They all turn to her. She’s standing with her arms crossed tight, tiny shoulders hunched, her face pinched and her eyes _close_ to tears but apparently not quite there yet.

“Is—? Is he…?”

“No,” Stan answers before any of the rest of them, and Richie wonders if it’s some weird ingrained Dad-instinct that injects that fucking stone cold certainty into his voice. But then again, that’s probably just Stan. “No, your dad’s going to be fine, because we’re going after him.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “Of course we are. Right, guys?”

Bev nods, and Bill does, and Richie does, too, because— well, that wasn’t really a question in the first place, was it? Of course they’re going after him. Of course they are, because it’s Eddie.

“Okay,” Frannie says. “Then I’m going, too.”

“Uh,” Richie says, blinking wide eyes down at her. “You sure the hell aren’t.”

_“What?”_

And it’s almost impressive, Richie thinks, how she’s still a solid four years away from teenagerdom and she still pulls off that oh-so-perfectly stereotypical teenage scowl. Not that it’s gonna sway any of them for even half a second, but still.

“You heard me, kid,” Richie says, aiming for gentle and probably missing, but whatever. “We’re not taking you down with us into what’s basically gonna be a slaughterhouse, okay? We’re gonna—”

“He’s _my_ dad!”

“Yeah, and he’s our friend, and—”

 _“So?”_ Frannie yells. “I don’t _care_ if he’s your friend, he’s _my_ dad, and he’s in trouble, and—”

“Fran,” Stan says, closing some of the distance between them until she’s just about in arm’s reach. He doesn’t crouch down or lean over with his hands on his knees like Richie’s expecting him to; instead he stays at his full height, arms crossed to mirror her, regarding her like he would any of the rest of them. “You’re right.”

“Uh, _what—?”_

Stan holds up a hand, cutting Richie off, and doesn’t look away from Frannie. “You’re right. He is your dad, and he is in trouble. And it’s _because_ he’s your dad that we can’t let you get into trouble, too. Do you understand that?”

Frannie doesn’t answer, even though Stan gives her a second to, so he takes it as a queue to continue.

“We can’t save your dad while putting you in danger at the same time,” Stan explains. “Because we’re going to need his help killing this monster once and for all, and frankly, he won’t be much help to us if he’s worried about you— and that’s not your fault,” he’s quick to add, because Frannie had puffed herself up to argue, “that’s not your fault at all, but… well, dads get a little stupid where their kids are concerned sometimes.”

A little stupid, Richie thinks, sure, like ditching the rest of them and high-tailing it right into the jaws of the beast because of one fake phone call. That would sure as hell qualify as a little fucking stupid.

_Jesus, Eds, what the fuck did you do?_

Stan says, “So do you get why we can’t in good conscience bring you with us?”

The kid glares up at him, arms still crossed so tight it almost looks like it hurts, but her lower lip wobbles. Her breath hitches and — maybe a little surprisingly, but fuck it, the kid’s going through a lot, who’s Richie to judge — she takes one step forward and unfurls her arms and wraps them around Stan’s waist.

The rest of them kind of awkwardly avert their eyes, and in Richie’s peripheral, Stan sighs and returns the hug as best he can. It doesn’t last long anyway. After about two seconds, if that, Frannie roughly shoves him away, and then she shoves past Richie and shoves past Bill until she’s cleared a path to the stairs, and she furiously scrubs her forearms over her face, hurriedly stomping up the steps toward the room that’s been hers and Eddie’s for the last day and a half.

A door slams, and Richie winces. He’s not the only one.

“Should we…?” Bev starts to ask.

Stan shakes his head. “I don’t know. Let’s just give her a

_minute since you’ve been to L.A., man.”_

Eddie sighs into the phone.

“Yeah. Yeah, it has been.”

The words come unbidden, no thought behind them. It barely even occurs to him that it’s a strange thing to say.

(He’s never been to L.A. at all, has he?)

_“When’s your flight land, again?”_

Eddie falls soundlessly back onto a bed— his bed, he knows, somehow. It’s his bed in his one-bedroom, six blocks from Myra’s, the apartment he chose specifically to make it easier on Frannie going back and forth after school. Late afternoon sunlight streams in through the window beside the bed, staining everything a bright, bright, searing white.

“Seven thirty,” he answers.

A low whistle. _“You’re killin’ me Smalls.”_

“You don’t have to—”

_“Zip it, Eds, I’m picking you up. I’m gonna bitch and moan the whole time, but…”_

“Wow,” Eddie deadpans. “And they say chivalry is dead.”

Richie’s laugh is soft on the other end of the phone, and it shoots a peculiar shock of… something, through Eddie’s chest. Something hot and staticky. He sighs again.

“I miss you, Richie.”

 _“You saw me last weekend, you animal,”_ Richie scoffs, but Eddie knows it’s coming when his voice loses that jokey quality and drops to an almost whisper. _“Yeah, no, I, uh… I miss you, too. Fuck, I missed you the second I got on the plane, dude.”_

There’s no one around to see him. Eddie throws his free arm over his face to hide his smile anyway.

 _“Glad you’re coming my way this time, though,”_ Richie goes on. _“Fuckin’ jet lag is one hell of a_

_nightmare_

_honey, it’s just a nightmare—_

“No, it’s not! It’s not a nightmare, I _saw_ it!”

Eddie folds his arms on the edge of Frannie’s mattress and rests his chin on them. For some reason he can’t quite feel the bed under his arms or the floor under his knees. It’s like he’s kneeling on a cloud, like he’s… weightless, somehow.

He doesn’t let himself worry about it.

“What’d you see?”

She sniffles and scrubs her tiny fists over her eyes. “It was the scary mouse.”

Eddie presses his lips together in what he hopes comes off as a sympathetic frown. Luckily, five-year-olds aren’t exactly experts at picking apart facial expressions, so she doesn’t pick up on the fact that he’s holding in a laugh. He asks, “Chuck E. Cheese?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know he’s not a bad mouse, right?”

“Yeah, he _is!_ You just don’t think so ‘cause you’re a dad and you’re all big and strong and all growed up but if you were small like me then he’d be like a _million billion_ feet tall and really scary!”

Eddie drops his forehead onto his arms for a second.

Again, he can’t… feel it, for some reason, and there’s this fucking mind-numbing whistle in his left ear, what the fuck is up with that, but whatever — and he thinks.

And he thinks, and he thinks.

This wouldn’t be an issue in the first place if she’d listened to him and _not_ climbed up on the stage with all the creepy fucking animatronics, but fuck it. What’s done is done. Now he’s on damage control.

“Okay.” He lifts his head, locks eyes with his daughter, deadly serious. “You wanna know a secret?”

Her eyes go wide. She nods, pulling her blanket in close.

“Chuck E. Cheese is only that big and scary _in_ Chuck E. Cheese. Once he leaves, he turns into a regular mouse.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “So even if he did come here, he’d be _this small,_ like a normal mouse. You wouldn’t be the small one anymore. In fact, _you’d_ be a million billion feet tall to _him._ Not so scary anymore, right? You could squish him with your shoe.”

Frannie blanches, eyes widening again. “Can I put a cup over him instead?”

Eddie snorts a laugh. That weird sound picks up in his left ear, like it’s… seeping in deeper, burrowing into his brain, but he grits his teeth through it and answers, “Yeah, you can do that.”

“And you’ll take him back outside?”

Eddie gives her a sagely nod. “Sure, honey. Sounds like a

_plan,”_ Stan says, hands on his hips, and he adds, “We need some idea of what the hell we’re dealing with, here.”

Richie blinks. “Uh, we _know_ what we’re dealing with here, don’t we?”

“I mean… do we?” Ben asks, not unkindly, but only because Richie’s about ninety-nine percent sure that Ben’s internal dial isn’t actually capable of reaching unkindness. He drops down to sit on the couch beside Bill — Bill, who has _finally_ stopped wearing a track into the carpet with his fucking pacing — and says, “We don’t know how to stop It. We can’t exactly run in there guns blazing—”

Richie throws his hands up. “We sure the fuck _can!_ Probably fucking literally! There’s gotta be a gun shop between here and Neibolt, I’d bet _money_ on it—”

“Yes, Richie,” Stan shoots a look at him. “Let’s bring a semi-automatic rifle into a fight with something that can make us hallucinate. That’ll go great.”

Richie sputters for half a second, but that’s all it takes for Bev to interject.

“One of us is going to have to stay behind,” she says. “To look after Frannie.”

“I— yeah, fine, yeah,” Richie admits with a huff, because she’s not wrong; it’s not like they can just leave the kid alone to fend for herself, and they’re sure as hell not bringing her with them. “So what’s Mike’s E.T.A., like, five minutes? We can all draw fuckin’ straws when he gets here, and then the rest of us can pile into his truck and haul ass to Neibolt. How’s that for a plan, Stan the Man? That work for you?”

Stan rolls his eyes, tucks his hands into the pockets of his cardigan, and…

And he circles through a very bizarre series of facial expressions in rapid succession. The first is clear and familiar annoyance with Richie, which, yeah, that one’s not exactly bizarre, but then it’s confusion, his brows creasing, and he pulls his hands out of his pockets and starts patting them down like a guy that can’t figure out where the fuck he left his wallet.

The fear is what comes slowest, a gradual dawning realization that something — though Richie has no idea _what_ — has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

“Shit,” he mutters, and his wide eyes are staring up at the ceiling. “Shit. _Fuck.”_

Before any of them can even ask what the hell he’s so fucking worried about now, Stanley bolts for the stairs, taking them two at a time, ignoring the rest of the losers calling out after him.

“Stan, what’s—?”

“Stan!”

“The fuck’s going on, man?” Richie shouts, chasing Stanley up the stairs, Ben hot on his heels and Bev and Bill right behind him. “Stan! Come on!”

He makes it up to the third floor just in time to see Stanley come running out of Eddie’s room, out of breath and panicked — which is _not_ a look he’s ever been used to seeing on Stan Uris, not back then when he was an uptight little preteen and certainly not fucking now.

Ben asks, “Stan?”

“None of us heard the front door open, did we?” Stan asks, pointing around at all of them. When they all give a series of baffled shrugs and head shakes, Stan drops his arm and says, “I had those— you know those fucking—” he pauses for breath, gesturing vaguely with one hand— “those Pop Pop Snappers, the little fireworks you throw at the ground? I bought them back at fucking Keene’s, and they were in my pocket, and now they’re _not,_ and I can only imagine Fran took them, and now she’s _not in her room.”_

 _Oh,_ Richie thinks.

_Fuck._

And that, of course, sends the rest of them fucking scattering like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off.

Richie ignores all of them. His heart’s hammering a mile a fucking minute as he sprints straight back down the stairs, right down to his own room on the second floor, and bursts through the door to find his room empty.

His baseball bat’s gone.

His baseball bat’s gone, and the window’s wide open. The window that Richie is one hundred percent positive he left shut. The window that’s positioned directly above the Derry Town House’s front porch roof. The window that’s _just_ about the right height for a kid to go sneaking out of, if she was determined enough, if she was really careful about sticking the landing on the way out.

“Fuck,” Richie turning out of the room and shouting back into the house. “GUYS! SHE’S GONE, SHE WENT AFTER

_EDDIE, DON’T LOOK AT IT, LOOK AT ME—”_

Eddie’s sitting in an inch-thick coating of grime in the house on Neibolt Street.

Pain’s lancing up from his fingertips through his wrist all the way up to his shoulder, and fuck, he never knew _anything_ could hurt like this, and it doesn’t matter because the clown’s right fucking there with its rows and rows of teeth and it’s coming at them even though Bev drove a fucking spike through its _fucking_ skull, it’s lurching forward on uneasy legs, claws tearing through its gloves, and Richie’s got a hand on either side of Eddie’s face and he’s crying — but what the fuck else is new, they’re all crying — and he’s saying _look at me, Eddie don’t look at it okay just look_

_at me, it’s okay, just look at me.”_

The private room in the Jade is fucking swarming with all kinds of horrors, bats and mutant fucking cicadas and half-formed baby birds, and Frannie doesn’t look at him but she does surge forward and hug his neck so tightly that it hurts, so he wraps his arms around her and half-buries his face in her shoulder.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he tells her, a reassurance that he tries to make himself believe, too. “I promise we’re gonna get out of here, okay? I promise it’s

_not real, it’s not real, it’s not—_

_“… little baby Edsie is such a big boy now, he doesn’t believe anymore, no…”_

He’s got his back pressed to the wall of the mirror maze, fire extinguisher held tight in one hand, and his mother is standing tall and imposing in front of him, tilting her head, frowning, concerned.

“What are you looking for, Eddie-bear?”

He can’t help it. He’s shrinking back against the wall, cowering.

“Eddie,” his mother says again, firmer. “What

_the fuck is she gonna do, echo-locate?”_

Richie shouts it, because he has to, because all fucking six of them are talking over each other at once, all crammed together like sardines into Mike’s old pick-up — Bev on Richie’s lap in the passenger seat, Bill and Ben and Stan all squished shoulder to shoulder in the tiny seat in the back. 

“How the fuck would she even know where to _go,”_ Richie repeats, and Mike takes a hard turn down Canal Street, and Bev grips Richie’s forearm as the whole damn truck lurches and creaks with it. The tires squeal.

“We said he went to Neibolt,” Bev says, low enough that Richie can hear it perfectly fine underneath Stan and Bill arguing about — fuck, Richie doesn’t know, maybe how to get to the fucking house faster. “We said that in front of her, and she’s got a phone, and there’s only one house on that street.”

“Fucking Google,” Richie mutters, dropping his forehead onto Bev’s shoulder, because it’s there. “Fuck, Bev.”

“I know.”

“We can’t let anything happen to her,” Richie says, squeezing his eyes shut. Mike slams on the brakes and then guns it again, but Richie can’t feel the seat belt — must be cutting into Bev’s opposite shoulder and hurting like a son of a bitch, but all Richie gets is her bony hip pressing into his stomach, and that hurts, too. “We can’t let It do anything to Eddie, but the kid isn’t even…”

“I know,” Bev repeats, and she gives his forearm a reassuring squeeze. There’s a note of something sharp in her voice, something cold and deadly, something that brings to mind a wild-eyed teenage Bev and the spike she wielded in that kitchen in Neibolt, once upon a time. “I know, and we’re not gonna let it.”

Richie gulps, then takes a breath and blows it out, raspberrying his lips.

“Tell ya what, Bev, I don’t know what

_the fuck is going on here, but I want the FUCK out.”_

There’s another low rumble from the behemoth of a shape that’s still blotting out the stars.

THAT IS NOT MY DOING.

AND TO BE FAIR, I DID WARN YOU THIS WOULD NOT LAST.

“Yeah, you didn’t fucking _warn_ me about—” Eddie waves a hand over his shoulder— “whatever the fuck all that was!”

When the shape next speaks, Eddie only catches the beginning of a syllable, not nearly enough to parse what’s being said, and then he’s

_running, running, running_

_running, huffing and puffing as his sneakers hit the pavement, jacket whipping behind him in the wind._

He’s panicking, heaving, panting as he rounds a corner from the Derry Town House.

Three blocks east. Around the bend next to the old beaten down playground no one ever used even back in the eighties, much less now. Shortcut through a tiny stretch of woods at the end of a dead end cul-de-sac — _would Bill have known about that or did he go around, maybe I can beat him there_ — and across the storefront-lined Canal Street on the other side.

The Zipper is the first thing he sees, flashing blue and white bulbs against a gray overcast sky, horrifyingly rickety metal cars flipping and flopping some fifty, sixty feet in the air.

Fucking deathtrap is what it is. That and just about every other ride here.

Eddie skids to a halt just under the entrance archway, and he’s so fucking out of breath, his lungs are _burning,_ and his ribs ache and it feels like a hole’s been punched straight through him, and he

_can’t breathe._

It has nothing to do with his asthma, or the anxiety, or whatever the fuck he actually has.

No, it definitely has something to do with the actual, literal hole that’s been punched through him. He does not want to think about the kind of medical horror show going on in his thorax right now, ripped open intestines and punctured lungs and a shattered sternum. Blood’s already bubbling out his mouth when he tries to speak.

His vision’s blotting in and out, but…

Richie’s here.

Richie’s here?

Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely Richie, pressing his own balled up leather jacket into Eddie’s stomach. He’s talking, his mouth’s moving, but Eddie can’t really make it out beyond some lip reading and guesswork.

His name.

 _Eddie,_ then _Eds._

The word _fuck,_ once or twice.

The word _please,_ a whole lot more than that.

Eddie can’t speak, he’s long since passed that point, so instead he summons some last bit of strength into his arm and reaches up, grips Richie’s shoulder with, he imagines, all the strength of an arthritic tortoise.

It still gets Richie to look at him. So that’s a win.

 _It’s okay,_ Eddie thinks, tries his damnedest to project across the space between them, because Richie’s crying and Eddie’s only seen that… maybe once or twice in his life, and he hates it just as much now as he did then.

_It’s okay, Richie. I’m okay._

He doesn’t quite believe it himself, but he’s hoping Richie does. He’s hoping a lot of things, actually, even if he’s

_running, running, running_

_running as fast as his feet will take him._

He’s diving out of the little hallway in the Jade and hauling toward their private room, weaving around a woman carrying a tray of dirty dishes and nearly sending the entire thing flying into the air, but it doesn’t fucking matter, and distantly, through a haze of pure adrenaline and terror, Eddie thinks he’s never run this fast in his life — _not in twenty-seven years_ — but it’s still not fucking fast enough, he needs to be there now, he needs to

_go, he needs to go, It has Bev, his friends are in trouble, he’s—_

“And just where do you think you’re off to?”

Eddie steps back, right arm encased in plaster and held in front of him like a shield, though he hardly notices he’s doing it.

“Out— out with my friends.”

“Sweetie,” his mother says, shaking her head. “You can’t go. You’re getting over your sickness, remember?”

Eddie feels it, then, not quite for the first time, but it’s certainly the first time he recognizes it. It’s the first time he feels that heat rising in his veins like billowing steam, the righteous anger that’s so fucking _searing_ he’s afraid he’ll burst with it.

“My sickness?”

It’s the same thing he’ll feel in twenty-seven years, fingers tight on his own arms as he realizes how close he’d come to taking all the same _shit_ he went through as a kid and flinging it right back on his own daughter.

It’s the same thing he’ll feel in a few weeks, alone with Bev in the clubhouse, when she ducks her head down and lowers her voice and Eddie realizes for the first time, at thirteen years old, that he fought an otherworldly horror that would make most adults shit their pants and yet he _still_ hasn’t seen every kind of monster the world has to offer.

It’s the same thing he’ll feel in a few hours, when the thing that killed his best friend’s baby brother takes the form of a rotting diseased _thing_ and vomits all over him in the cave under Neibolt.

“My sickness, okay, what— What sickness, Ma?”

For the first time in his life, he doesn’t feel small. He’s squaring his shoulders and he’s holding a bottle of pills up for her to see and he’s throwing it on the floor and he’s

_running running running_

_running faster than he’s ever run before._

The lights of the Derry Canal Days Festival are nothing but a retreating neon swatch on the night sky behind him, and he sprints by the dilapidated old playground and back through that short-cut at the end of the cul-de-sac, panic clawing at his insides, sneakers slapping the pavement, his daughter’s terrified voice playing on a fucking loop in his head, and he’s just a few blocks from Neibolt now, and—

He nearly smacks directly into it.

Into _It._

He rounds a corner and there it is, standing right in front of him in the middle of the fucking street, eight, nine, ten feet tall, lilting to the side and grinning down at him with those rows and rows of teeth in its blood red mouth. The flickering street lights on either side cast long, distorted shadows across its long, distorted face.

Eddie staggers back a step.

And then the anger comes back, and it’s enough, even for just a moment, to override the all-encompassing fear that’s paralyzed his limbs. He clenches his fists, roots his feet to the ground.

“Where is she?”

The clown giggles, lurches backward a step, like it’s stumbling drunk. Its mouth splits open ever wider, and it keeps on giggling and giggling and giggling.

_“Ooh, hoo, hoo, look at little baby Edsie, little baby Eddie-bear all alone—”_

“FUCK you!” Eddie screams, fists clenched so tight he swears he’s digging divots into his own palms. “Fuck you, I’m not— I’m not _afraid_ of you—”

_“Hee hee hee, oh, you do want to believe that, don’t you?”_

“I’m not,” Eddie insists, but he can hear the way his voice cracks at the end. Fuck. “I’m not fucking afraid of you, I’m not—”

The clown’s eyes unfocus. Its smile goes slack, its jaw hangs open, and its skull tips back and back and back, its hundreds of teeth splaying out and distorting as its jaw hangs lower and lower, elongating like it’s made of fucking _puddy_ and not flesh and bone, and from inside, from the back of its throat…

“I’m not afraid,” Eddie repeats, but it comes out as a whisper, and he realizes he’s not sure who he’s trying to convince. “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid—”

White light.

Nothing but white, white, white.

White light, and a piercing whistle through his left ear, burrowing into his brain.

White light, and a low thrum that rattles the very foundation of his being, vibrates along his fucking bones.

White light, and the voice.

The voice of It.

**_YOU WILL BE._ **

Predictably, the house on Neibolt is exactly the same as it’s been in all of Richie’s cryptic fucking nightmares over the course of the last three decades.

Same boarded up windows. Same overgrown lawn. Same spiked fence posts all rusted and bent out of shape. Same stench of dry-rot and dust and mildew. Richie’s even pretty fucking sure that the dead vines and cobwebs creeping down from the doorway are the very same ones he had to bat out of his way twenty-seven years ago, the very same ones that held up an old MISSING poster with his face plastered right on it.

_Missing, Richie Tozier, 13 years old._

Huh.

Weird. He’d mostly forgotten about that part.

Not like he totally forgot, of course. Not like the fear hasn’t clung to him for his entire adult life. Not like the thought hasn’t crept back up, again and again and again, in the early hours of the morning, whenever he got to the sappy part of being drunk, any time he entertained the thought of coming out for so much as half a second.

Look at this, the poster said. Look at what the future’s got in store for you.

As they pass under the threshold into the darkness of the house, Richie thinks of the poster that got shoved at him in the park today, the memorial poster for his own damn funeral, and he realizes that it’s a little fucking sad that his deepest fears now are roughly the same shape as the deepest fears he had at thirteen.

And then, right at that moment, several things happen at once.

One: He thinks with a bit of pointed vitriol and a glare in the general direction of the Neibolt basement, _You’re recycling your material, asshole. That’s some lazy shit, even for me._

Two: The kitchen door slams shut behind him. With Ben and Bev and Mike on the other side of it.

Three: At the opposite side of the kitchen, where Stan’s just passed the threshold into the next hallway, that door _also_ slams shut, leaving Bill and Richie alone in the kitchen.

And, lastly, as expected:

All hell breaks loose.

_ohhh little baby Eddie-bear_

_what are you looking_

_Eddie look at me don’t look at it look at_

_wanna know a secret_

_running, running, running_

_wouldn’t be the small one anymore_

_missed you the second I got on the_

_running, running, running_

_Eds come on, fuck, please_

_you were sick, Eddie, you are sick_

_sickness, what— what sickness, Ma?_

_you can feel it, you could always feel that there’s something rotten_

_turned around and did the exact same_

_running, running, running_

_ask you this, does she carry her own inhaler_

_head medicine it’s head medicine it’s_

_bullshit it’s all fucking bullshit_

_it f- f- fuh- fuck, it fucking sucks, and it hurts, but I… I’d rather remember_

_running, running, running_

_mashed potatoes all over it and I’VE GOT A BROKEN_

_(acid it’s acid if I want it to be so eat it eat it eat)_

_you’d be a million billion feet tall to him_

_BATTERY ACID, FUCKNUTS_

_just a fucking clown a mimic a fucking bully_

_a million billion feet tall_

_eyes on me Eds please fuck you’re not fucking dying in_

_Oh, I’m fucking dying,_ Eddie thinks, clear as crystal.

It’s the only clear thought he has at all, really, when something is rending his brain apart and scattering the pieces wherever the fuck it damn well pleases, and it _hurts,_ and he’s got to be dying, or at least he hopes so, because if he’s already dead and this is what eternity is like he doesn’t think he can take it, and

_ooh, hoo, hoo, ee, hee, hee, little baby Edsie_

_fuck you fuck you_ _I’m not afraid of_

_want to believe that don’t you_

_fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck_

_little baby Eddie-bear all alone_

_“FUCK! YOU!”_

He shouts it, screams it into the ether, and his voice is swallowed up in the trillions of stars churning around him, above and around and below, too.

Something hears him, though.

A great, black shape blotting out the stars.

“Please,” Eddie says before he can even put thought to the word. His voice comes out cracked and hollow and exactly how he feels — cracked wide open, ribs bent and pried outward with a fucking crobar, thoughts scattered across everything that’s ever existed, and he’s so fucking _tired,_ and…

“Please, just… Please help me.”

A low rumble.

A hum.

A sigh?

I CANNOT.

“Why not?” Eddie asks right away. “You’re not— You’re not _It,_ I can tell that, so why—”

I CANNOT.

“It— It’s _killing_ kids, you fucking asshole!” he screams, because he feels like he’s been — _has been will be_ — ripped apart from every possible angle, but somehow that’s the part that he’s most pissed off about. “It’s killing kids, and now it’s going after _my_ kid, and—”

IT HAS KILLED MANY CHILDREN, the shape tells him. ACROSS MANY LIFETIMES.

THIS IS NO DIFFERENT.

Eddie rears back like he’s been hit.

“No.”

The shape doesn’t say anything to that, but there’s a question in the silence. A waiting.

“No, this is very fucking different,” Eddie says, voice wobbling. “This is fucking different because this is _my fucking kid._ It fucking— It poisoned the shit out of Derry, got its fucking roots dug in, and it made all the parents in that town stop giving a shit, and— and I don’t know, maybe that wasn’t It, maybe that was just Derry, maybe no one in that town ever gave a shit except for us, but _we fucking did,_ and I got the _fuck_ out, and I do give a shit, and I’m _here_ now, I’m her dad and I’m _here,_ so it’s really _fucking different,_ okay?”

Another low rumble.

 _“Help_ me. Please. She doesn’t deserve this.”

THAT IS TRUE.

BUT NEITHER DID MANY OF THE CHILDREN IT HAS TAKEN.

“Yeah,” Eddie fires back. “And you know what _fucking_ else? Neither did we! Me and Ben and Bev and Richie and Mike and Stan and Bill, _none_ of us deserved that. You or the universe or whoever the fuck’s in charge of all this bullshit owes us now. You fucking _owe_ us.”

This time, the low rumble has the undercurrent of a laugh.

“And just what the fuck are you laughing at, huh?”

I FORGET, SOMETIMES.

ORNERY LITTLE THINGS, EH?

SUPPOSE YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE SURVIVED THE FIRST TIME IF YOU WEREN’T.

Eddie gulps. He still feels like he’s being flayed apart from the inside, and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to work out whether that was an insult or a compliment, so he doesn’t bother.

“Help us,” he says again. “Please.”

MM.

AGAIN, I CANNOT HELP YOU.

BUT YOU CAN HELP EACH OTHER.

_running running running_

_Eddie look at me don’t look at it look at_

_he’s hurt real bad, guys, we gotta_

_oh my god Bill Ben someone he’s lost his arm, his_

_hey hey_

_h_

_e_

_y_

_E d_

_d i_

_e_

_h_

_e_

_y_

_c_

_o_

_m_

_e_

  
  


_on, Eds, snap out of it.”_

The low hum’s risen in a crescendo, built up into a steady roar, and Eddie still feels intimately fucking acquainted with what it must be like to be mentally drawn and quartered, but the ear-splitting whistle is finally receding, and there’s something warm on either side of his face.

Hands. Those are hands.

White light rings the edges of his vision, yellow blots bursting, and he recognizes the hands on his face as belonging to Richie _well_ before he can make out the details of his face.

“Come on,” Richie says again, and his hands are so fucking warm, big enough to span from beneath Eddie’s jaw up to his cheekbones, cradling him there, holding him up. He cracks a smile that Eddie can see has nothing but nerves in it, no humor whatsoever, and he makes a joke anyway. “Hey, don’t make me kiss you back to life, man, ‘cause I’ll fucking do it.”

Behind Richie, somewhere, someone’s screaming. He hears the clown’s voice intermingled in there, angry and taunting. There’s the violent crash of something made of rock being shattered to bits.

Are they… under Neibolt? In the caves?

Yeah, that makes sense. Of course they’re under Neibolt.

Eddie blinks.

“Holy shit, okay, there he is!” Richie shouts, taking even that much as a sign that Eddie’s not completely fucking catatonic. His smile is more genuine now, crinkling the corners of his eyes. He pats Eddie’s cheek, once, then twice. “There he is, up and at ‘em, Eds, we gotta—”

His voice cuts off, and Eddie—

Eddie doesn’t know why. Not at first.

All he’s aware of, for one confusing moment, is the spray of something warm across his face.

Then he looks down, slowly, too slowly, and sees something on— _in_ Richie’s chest that should not be there. Something white and mottled brown, something pointed and dripping with _black sludge wait no that’s not black it’s red it’s oh God oh fuck oh no fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck—_

“E— Eds?”

Then the thing in Richie’s chest is gone, and it must have been the only thing keeping him upright, because his legs give out a half second later, and Eddie goes right down with him.

“Richie, no, no, no, come on, look at me— Richie— _RICHIE!”_


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for, uh. horror. and the clown. also, major spoilers for the end of the book? like, there is so much of the book in this chapter that i can't even properly credit where stephen king's writing ends and mine begins, so just [gestures vaguely] enjoy

“STAN!”

Richie’s ramming his shoulder into the kitchen door before he even realizes he’s moved.

_“STAN!”_

He gets a fist tight around the doorknob and shakes and twists it even though he knows for a fucking fact that it’s not gonna do shit, then he beats the side of his fist into the wood, over and over again because _fuck shit maybe he can hear me, fuck fuck fuck Stan’s alone, he’s fucking alone again this is exactly what happened the first time how the FUCK did we let it happen again—_

Bill shoves him aside, and without a word he takes a step back, lifts his leg, and drives the heel of his foot into the door.

Nothing.

Not so much as a _fucking_ creak.

“You have to k- kick next to the lock,” Bill explains, heaving, gesturing nonsensically with one hand as he speaks like, _Oh, you know, kick next to the lock, ‘cause that’s some common fucking knowledge, isn’t it?_

He tries again, all while Richie ignores him and keeps beating his fist into the door and shouting Stan’s name through the door jamb. Richie can’t say anything else, can’t _think_ of anything else aside from that freaky twisted woman and her distorted gums and rows of shark teeth clamped down over Stanley’s face, little thirteen-year-old Stanley convulsing flat on his back like he’s already dead or close to it, though in Richie’s mind he’s now weirdly superimposed with the forty-year-old he’s come to know over the last twenty-four hours, and at forty or thirteen or whatever age he is he’s screaming _you left me you left me alone you’re not my friends you made me go into Neibolt you left me—_

There’s a rumble, then, and it doesn’t come from the doorway that’s blocking them from getting to Stan.

It comes from directly above.

Bill stops ramming his foot into the door. He stumbles back a step, and both of them go totally quiet, staring with wary eyes up at the crumbling rotten ceiling tiles and the bits of exposed piping and the cobwebs.

The sound is almost like it could be coming from those pipes, Richie thinks. Like the drawn out rumble of distant thunder, the rattling of ancient rusted out metal joints.

_Ooh hoo hoo hee hee hee…_

Behind him, Bill reaches out, fumbling for Richie’s sleeve and then gripping his hand, fingers warm and curling tight around the side of his palm like they’re little kids again. There’s barely any fucking light in this kitchen as is, but somehow it gets darker, like a shroud was dropped over the dust-smeared windows. Richie can just barely make out silhouettes, the old grimy refrigerator, the glint of piping in the little gaps of the ceiling, the one gaping fucking hole at the other end of the kitchen where once upon a time a thirteen-year-old Eddie toppled down and smashed a fucking table in half.

_“Hee, hee, hee, hee, heeeeeeee!”_

There’s a thud from above, too, and another, and another, and then the low rumbling builds and builds until—

Oh.

It’s not a rumble at all, Richie realizes, and it’s not thunder, and it’s not the fucking pipes.

It’s a growl.

 _“Ohh, Richie, you finally came back,”_ the clown’s voice ricochets in a warbling echo through the gaps in the ceiling, low and giggly, and the growling doesn’t stop. _“Trashmouth’s all grown up and big now, isn’t he, yes he is…”_

The ceiling tile directly above them quivers with the next thud, and a plume of dust and powdered plaster comes swirling down right in front of Richie’s face.

_“Yes, he is, but you’re still the same old Trashmouth, aren’t ya, Richie?”_

Richie squeezes his eyes shut until stars burst behind his eyelids, but when he opens them, everything’s still the same. Same dusty kitchen and same rotted-out ceiling, a little clearer since his eyes have begun to adjust, but not by much. There’s another thud, and another, like something big and hulking and growling is stomping its way across the ceiling, making its way toward one of the gaps where it’ll — where _It_ will be able to hop right down here, here where he and Bill are standing and clutching each other’s hands like little kids.

Like holding onto each other is gonna help fucking anything. Like it helped fucking anything back then.

 _“You still like scary movies, Richie?”_ the clown asks, voice lilting with the question like it’s genuinely curious, like they’re a couple of old pals catching up. _“Never got too scared of those movies, did ya, Richie? The teenage Frankenstein was too gross to really be scary, wasn’t he, Richie?”_

Richie backs up a step. It’s instinct.

Bill follows along with him, his hand clammy and tight in Richie’s, and then Richie feels him grabbing his upper arm with his free hand, too.

 _“No, no, no, not scary at all,”_ the clown’s voice goes on, and the giggling’s faded away, but the growling sure the fuck hasn’t. There’s another thud, one that by Richie’s best guess can’t be more than a few feet from the massive fucking hole at the other end of the ceiling.

_“Not scary at all, no, no, no.”_

Another thud, and then—

A set of four fingers, too long and claw-tipped and covered in grotesque matted fur, appears from the edge of the hole in the ceiling, curling around a rotten floorboard from the second floor.

 _“But the teenage_ **_werewolf,_ ** _now that was somehow scarier, w_ ** _asn’t it, Richie?”_ **

Unthinking, Richie all but ferries Bill behind him, backing up another step. And the funny thing is, he’s not even sure why he does it. He doesn’t think it’s out of some weird misplaced need to, like, _protect_ him or some shit — Bill might have stopped growing at sixteen while Richie shot right past him, but there was never a question which one of them was the protector, which one of them was the older brother, and it sure the fuck was never Richie.

No, he thinks he knows why he’s putting himself between Bill and the werewolf — between Bill and _It_ — and it has a whole lot more to do with trying to block Bill’s view.

_“Oh, yes, the teenage werewolf was so much scarier, wasn’t it, Richie?”_

He gulps, tightens his grip on Bill’s hand. There’s an answering tightening of the grip on his upper arm, firm and reassuring.

 _“Because it was kind of sad, too,_ **_wasn’t_ ** _it, Richie? What happened wasn’t his fault,_ **_was_ ** _it, Richie?”_

The claw-tipped hand retreats back behind the ceiling tile.

 _“It was the hypnotist who did that to the poor boy,_ **_wasn’t_ ** _it,”_ the clown goes on, mocking, that low growl taking up more and more of its voice with every passing second. _“But that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the kicker! The only reason he could turn that boy into a monster at all was because he already_ **_was_ ** _one! Because of all those bad feelings filling him up, hidden away…”_

There’s a creak somewhere up above, and then—

“Jesus— FUCK!”

Richie stumbles back another step as a great black shape comes leaping down from the hole in the ceiling, not five fucking feet away, landing on its feet with an explosion of dust and the cracking of abused hardwood. It’s facing away from them and it’s — Jesus Christ it’s eight, nine, ten feet tall, standing on misshapen legs with backward joints like a dog’s, matted black fur showing through the frayed ripped tatters of what used to be a pair of jeans, through the tears in its Letterman jacket.

It turns, slowly, towering over Richie to the point that he feels like he has to do a fucking backbend to keep the thing in his sights, its claws twitching, its teeth glinting, saliva beading at the corners of its lips.

A growl resonates from the thing’s throat.

And somewhere else, somewhere still above, the clown’s voice rings out:

 _“Ooh, hoo, hoo! Hee hee hee! And what about what you’re_ **_hiding,_ ** _Richie? What happens when they see it, too? What happens then, Richie? Hee hee hee hee hee, I guess we’ll h_ ** _ave to find out!”_ **

It takes Richie three fucking tries to find his own voice, locked as it his beneath a hard lump in his throat.

“It— It’s not—”

The creature stalks forward a step, fumbling and drunken and clumsy. A glob of drool comes rolling off its lower lip, stretching in a thin line until it hits the floor below. There’s blood spattered all over the thing’s clothes, its fur, its teeth, its claws. And there— _there’s_ the worst of it, stitched in golden thread on the bloody left breast of the werewolf’s jacket, stained but readable:

RICHIE TOZIER.

 _“Fuck_ you!”

He forces the words out, yanks them out from where they were sitting sticky and stubborn and tangled in his vocal chords, flings them out, and when they do come out… somehow they’re not the words he was searching for. Somehow it doesn’t sound right, either.

It doesn’t sound like _him,_ the voice foreign to his own ears.

“Fuck you, I’m not— I’m not _afraid_ of you—”

His heart’s lodged in his throat and there’s an itch somewhere around there, too, a tingle that starts between his shoulder blades and creeps up and up and up and up into the vertebrae at the back of his neck, radiating through the base of his skull, prickling, hairs standing on end. His voice still does not sound like his own. It doesn’t _feel_ like his own.

Something about the voice in his throat is familiar, he thinks, but it shouldn’t— it shouldn’t be coming from _him,_ it shouldn’t be vibrating through his vocal chords and it shouldn’t be thrumming through his bones like this, half a step deeper than it should be—

“I’m not,” the voice that’s not Richie’s says, “I’m not fucking afraid of you, I’m not—”

The werewolf lurches forward a step, a grin splitting its lupine face, and another glob of saliva falls from its lips, and—

And an arm appears from behind it.

A human arm. A _normal_ arm, wrapped around the thing’s neck from behind. An arm clothed in… green flannel?

It takes a weird, very surreal delay before Richie can recognize the arm as belonging to Bill, before he can realize that his own hand has been gripping nothing but empty air and he hasn’t even noticed, before he can recognize the furious fucking battle cry as one that’s coming from _Bill_ and that the crazy son of a bitch has just leapt onto the werewolf’s back and is seriously trying to choke it out—

“EAT F- F- _FUCKING_ SILVER, ASSHOLE!”

Richie has no idea what the fuck Bill is yelling about, but whatever, fuck, apparently they’re fighting the ten-foot-tall werewolf monster now, because why the fuck not? Why the fuck wouldn’t they be? So he frantically looks around, hoping for some kind of weapon, _any_ kind of weapon, and he scrambles for a long piece of broken wood that’s probably been sitting untouched on this floor since nineteen-fucking-eighty-nine. It’s about the size of a 2-by-4, and maybe it was one, once, before the termites and the years took their toll.

Richie cracks his neck from side to side, winds up, and swings the plank in a wide arc for the werewolf’s legs.

The plank snaps in half.

 _“Fuck,_ shit, shit, shitshitshit,” Richie spews curses, right as the werewolf lets out an unholy shriek like nothing Richie’s ever heard.

He looks up, and there’s— is that _smoke?_ Bill’s still holding onto the thing for dear life, both arms wrapped around its neck from behind, and with one hand he’s pressing something into the thing’s face, something too small to see, and there’s honest-to-God _smoke_ trailing out from the space between Bill’s palm and the werewolf’s grotesque blood-spattered forehead. Right between its beady black eyes.

Richie tosses the broken half of wooden plank away, takes one step forward, and Spartan kicks the werewolf’s left leg with everything he’s got in him.

“FUCK! YOU!”

He kicks again, and the thing’s leg _snaps_ backward, the shrieks rising in intensity, and it staggers back, flailing wildly with its claws and trying to dislodge Bill from its back, and— _fuck,_ one swipe of those claws could be enough to open Bill up from ass to elbow, so Richie swings a kick at the same leg but from the side, and then does another Spartan kick, but this time to the thing’s right leg instead of its left.

The werewolf buckles.

  
  
  
  
  


_white_

_white_

_white_

_white_

_white_

_l i g h t_

  
  
  
  


_— who are you and why did you come to Me?_

  
  
  


_( I’m Bill Denbrough. )_

  
  


_Eddie_

_Eddie Kasprak_

_asshole, you know who I am_

  
  


_( You know who I am )_

_( and why I’m here. )_

  
  


_and I don’t know why the fuck I’m here but_

  
  


_( You killed my brother, and )_

  
  


_you killed my best friend’s little brother_

_Georgie he didn’t do_

_anything to deserve that_

_fucked up shit and_

  
  


_( I’m here to kill you. )_

  
  


_we’re gonna kill you, asshole, because_

  
  


_( You picked the wrong kid, bitch. )_

  
  


_you picked the wrong kids to fuck with_

  
  
  


“Bill, what the _fuck?!”_

The werewolf’s wild shrieks die out as its other leg snaps back, its whole torso careens forward, and—

And it vanishes. Halfway between fully standing and colliding facefirst with the floor, it disintegrates into a pile of dust that wafts out in all directions. Bill hits the floor on his hands and knees. Something _tings_ when it falls out of his hand and rolls and bounces across the hardwood. Richie falls back onto his ass, heaving and panting, scrubbing the heel of his palm against his chest like that’ll slow the rapidfire hammering of his pulse.

“Bill,” Richie manages to choke out again. “Bill, what the fuck— what the _fuck_ was that?”

He tries to make it sound less… well, less fucking terrified than it does. He means to say something along the lines of _Jesus, Big Bill, where the fuck did all that badassery come from, huh?_

Something tells him he doesn’t quite manage it.

Bill misinterprets his question anyway. He breathlessly paws at the ground, grabbing up what appears to be a quarter and holding it up for Richie to see.

“Silver,” he says, tucking the quarter back into his pocket. “Quarters w- w- were made with silver before ‘65.”

“Wha—? How the _fuck_ did you have time to check what _fucking_ year the quarter in your pocket was made in?” Richie borderline shouts. Or, well, maybe not borderline. Maybe he actually shouts. He tugs a hand through his hair, trying to get a handle on his goddamn breathing. “What the _fuck.”_

“I, uh— I- I didn’t,” Bill says, and then he’s shuffling forward until he’s able to pull Richie in by the shoulders and wrap him in a hug. “I just… hoped?”

“Fuck,” Richie breathes again, and then one more time, because apparently that’s all he’s capable of saying now, and he tucks his face into Bill’s shoulder while he gets his bearings. And then: “Fuck, _Stan._ He’s still—”

There’s a POP and the crackle of splitting wood as the kitchen door is kicked open.

Richie and Bill both jump, scrambling apart just as Stan comes barreling into the room, already swearing.

“Jesus _Christ,_ fucking finally.”

“Stan?” Bill asks, sitting back on his heels. “You okay?”

“Am _I_ okay,” Stan repeats, rolling his eyes, but the effect is a little lost when his voice is all choked up and he’s shaking as bad as he is. His hair looks like he’s just been through a fucking wind tunnel, his chest heaving as he tries to catch his breath, blue-gray eyes wide and shining. “The fuck kind of question—”

He shakes his head, reaching out to help Richie to his feet, and then pulls him into a quick one-armed hug as soon as he’s standing. He does the same for Bill, too.

“I’ve been trying to get to _you_ two this whole time. The fucking clown wouldn’t— I couldn’t—”

_“GUYS!”_

They all startle at the sound of Mike’s voice, shouting from… wherever the fuck he is, but it’s sure as hell not the next room over where he was last.

The basement, maybe?

“Mike?” Richie shouts as he, Bill, and Stan start hurrying out of the kitchen.

“We’re downstairs!” Bev confirms. “We found Frannie!”

“Shit,” Stan curses again, and all three of them are already scrambling through the hall, batting cobwebs out of their way toward the staircase down to the basement. The whole place is goddamn _eerily_ quiet in the wake of the shitshow in the kitchen, nothing but the pounding of their shoes on the hardwood and the sound of Ben and Mike and Bev’s voices down in the basement.

  
  
  


_( thrusts )_

  
  


_I am eternal._

_I am the Eater of Worlds._

  
  


_( his fists )_

  
  
  


_( That so? )_

_Oh? Eater of Worlds, huh? That so?_

_( Well, you’ve had your last meal, sister. )_

_Well, you’ve had your last meal, asshole._

_You’re not killing any more kids._

_And you’re sure as hell not hurting my kid._

  
  


_( he thrusts his )_

  
  


_ooh hoo hoo ee hee hee_

_— you have no power; here is the power; feel the power, brat, and then speak again of how you come to kill the Eternal._

_You think you see Me?_

  
  
  


_( he thrusts his fists )_

  
  
  


_Yeah. Yeah, you know what?_

_I think I do._

  
  
  


_( his fists into the )_

  
  
  


_You see only what your mind will allow._

_Would you see Me?_

_Ee hee hee ooh hoo hoo, well, come then!_

_Come, brat!_ **_Come and see!_ **

  
  


_COME_

_AND_

_SEE_

  
  
  
  
  
  


When they finally get down to the basement, Richie sees three things, in order:

One:

The well is still there. And oh, he hates that fucking well. Old bricks and crumbling bits of concrete, standing exactly how Richie remembers it, exactly how he just now realizes it’s always sat in the back of his mind for twenty-seven years in all its creepy cobweb-coated glory.

Two:

Out of the trio of Ben-Bev-Mike, Ben draws his attention first; he looks a shade too pale, one arm slung over Mike’s shoulders, the other wrapped snug around his own waist.

Three:

Frannie is nowhere to be seen.

“Shit,” Bill mutters, immediately moving to hover at Ben’s other side, angling to slot himself underneath the arm that’s not already supported by Mike. “You okay?”

Ben winces, nods, and manages a half-smile that has no right to be as sweet and charming as it is when he looks like he’d give an 8 or a 9 if an E.R. nurse asked his pain level right now. He gingerly lifts his arm away from Mike, standing under his own power, and says, “I’m… okay.”

“Oh, yeah, you look it,” Richie says.

“I’m _okay,”_ Ben insists. He gently taps the bloodstain on his shirt and doesn’t so much as wince, so at least that’s… slightly encouraging. Richie still doesn’t want to know what it looks like underneath, but whatever, he’ll leave it.

“Where’s the kid?” Richie asks, looking from Mike to Ben to Bev. “You guys said—?”

And, confirming his fears, all three of them look in the direction of the _fucking_ well.

“We saw her just as she was going down there,” Mike explains. “We tried to get her to stop, but…”

“She wouldn’t,” Ben finishes for him. “Probably thinks we’d stop her from going after Eddie if we caught up with her.”

“How do you know it was really her?” Bill asks. “How do we know it wasn’t…?”

A trick. The fucking clown. Bill doesn’t need to finish the question, but it’s a long tense moment before anyone gathers up the guts to answer it.

Bev quietly admits, “We don’t.”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie mutters.

Stan agrees, “Fucking wonderful.”

It’s Bill that steps up to the well first, because of course it is. He leans over the crumbling wall of bricks and peers down to the bottom, and then he sends a look up at the rest of them, shrugs, and swings a leg over. “Here g- g- goes nothing, right?”

With that, he wraps the rope around his wrist and hops in.

Stan follows after him, then Mike, then Ben — valiantly hiding another flinch when he lifts his leg over the wall — and then it’s just Bev and Richie, standing over the well and watching as their friends are slowly enveloped by the darkness below.

Bev reaches out and squeezes his arm, which is the only thing that makes him realize he’s been staring into the depths with a thousand yard stare.

“You okay, Rich?”

He takes a slow breath, puffs it out, and nods. Because he’s as okay as he can be. He’s alive. So far. And he’s not turning around as long as Eddie and his kid are down there, and they all fucking know it.

“Yeah, yeah,” Richie sighs. “Still say we should’ve brought a fucking machine gun, though.”

That gets half a laugh out of her, so Richie’s gonna count it as a win. He takes her hand off his arm, gives a dramatic little bow, and kisses her knuckles before gesturing with a gentlemanly wave at the well.

“After you, Miss Marsh.”

And she doesn’t waste another minute.

The climb down isn’t so bad. Kind of reminds Richie of exactly how fucking out of shape he is compared to when he was a scrawny little thirteen-year-old, but other than that, not so bad. Uneventful.

The second his feet hit the bottom, though, there’s the screeching of rats and the gurgle of running water and, so gradually Richie’s not sure when it started or if it’s been there all along: Laughing. The clown, somewhere deep down in this labyrinth of sewer channels, laughing its ass off, letting its giggly voice ricochet around the walls down here in an endless fucking echo.

Within seconds, they’re all holding each other’s hands like a pack of kindergarteners on a field trip, inching along through the waist-deep greywater. The laughter fades in and out — _ee hee hee, ooh hoo hoo, ee hee hee hee hee_ — but it never totally goes away.

Not until they find the platform, anyway.

“Oh, what the fuck is that?” Richie murmurs, as everything around them falls silent — the laughing, the rats screeching, the gurgle of the water around them, fucking _everything_ — and the six of them stare up at the raised platform. It’s really just a pile of scrap and trash risen above the stagnant greywater, but at the top of it…

Stan asks, “Is that a goddamn manhole, Mike?”

Mike nods, eyes locked on the platform, and he starts wading through the water without another word.

“Yeah, let’s all go down the creepy manhole,” Richie mutters. “Sounds great.”

But he follows behind Mike anyway, just like he knows the rest of them will. Just like they _all_ know they will. He wades through the water, arms raised up as it creeps deeper and deeper, raising up to chest-level.

Christ, would the kid have even been able to touch the bottom if she came through this way? Would she have had to swim? Would the clown have even fucking let her get this far before—?

“Bev.”

Richie’s already on the platform when he hears Ben whispering after Bev, and he turns around to see that she’s the only one who hasn’t started climbing. She’s facing away from the rest of them, shining a flashlight down into the tunnel where they’ve all just come from.

“Bev,” Ben tries again, still whispering through the stifling silence. “What’s wrong?”

She turns back to the rest of them, shaking her head. “Nothing, I just… thought I heard—”

There’s a splash as something — and _something_ is all Richie can think at first, something dark and wet and fucking huge, a great black shape that’s dripping greywater — rises out of the water right in front of Bev’s face, blotting out the light from her flashlight, and Bev _screams_ as the thing descends on her, ripping her out of the water.

“BEV!”

The thing holding onto her twists around to look at the rest of them, sneering with a mouth full of needle-like teeth in a distorted old woman’s face, and says, **_“Time to sink!”_ **

It and Bev are gone an instant later.

“Shit!”

  
  
  
  


_YOU’RE DOING GOOD, SON._

  
  


_What? I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing!_

  
  


_BUT VERY SHORTLY IT’S GOING TO BE TOO LATE._

  
  


_What? What the FUCK DO YOU MEAN IT’S—_

  
  
  
  
  


Richie doesn’t think. He’s pretty sure Mike and Ben and Bill and Stan don’t, either. All Richie actually knows is that greywater is ten thousand times more disgusting when he’s fully underwater and trying to keep his eyes open, and in the back of his mind, somewhere under the adrenaline pumping and the panic over Bev, he swears he can hear fourteen-year-old Eddie’s rapidfire lecturing about parasites and bacteria and shit and _Richie don’t open your fucking eyes in this water are you out of your fucking mind—_

Contact! Fuck yeah!

Richie’s hand closes on an arm, and at first he thinks it must be Bev, but then he gets close enough to actually _see_ a few blurry shapes through the green, and he sees he’s grabbed the creepy-ass old lady by the arm instead.

You know what?

Fuck it. He’ll take it.

He tightens his grip and tugs. A stream of bubbles comes out of his mouth without his permission as he tugs again, and again, and again and again and again, trying to get the thing off of Bev, and he realizes belatedly that his lungs are burning a little. Out of the corner of his vision he sees someone — Ben, maybe? — swimming up and kicking viciously at the thing’s other arm, and then the arm Richie’s tugging at finally gives way, and then someone else is grabbing onto Bev and pulling her to safety.

Richie’s chest is imploding. That’s what’s happening right now. It’s imploding and it’s gonna shrink down to a pinprick like a collapsing black hole if he doesn’t get out of the water _now,_ so he lets go of the old lady’s arm and starts swimming up—

— and feels claws digging into his ankle half a second later.

It’s tugging him back down.

Fuck.

_Fuck._

Richie kicks and kicks and kicks, but the thing doesn’t let go. He kicks with his other leg and misses. He tries again and misses again. He feels a pair of hands on his back and then on his upper arms, and he nearly elbows whoever it is in the face, but then they tug him upward and Richie forces himself to focus for half a second, and he looks down until he can see the thing’s face well enough through the water — sagging skin and jagged teeth and gaping maw opening wide — to aim a donkey kick straight for the center of it.

The claws dislodge from his ankle, and somebody hauls him out of the water.

It takes him a minute to recognize the arms around him as belonging to Mike. Honestly, Richie’s a little too busy coughing up a century’s worth of rotting greywater to recognize anything. Mike helps him the rest of the way up to the platform, where Ben and Bill and Stan are halving their attention between making sure Bev’s okay and doing the same for Richie.

“I’m— _fuck,_ I’m— I’m good,” Richie coughs, clutching Mike’s upper arm like a lifeline while he works on hacking up the lining of his lungs. “I’m fine. Bev?”

She gives a shaky nod.

Richie breathlessly gives an OK sign, then pats Mike’s arm. “Okay. Good. Fuckin’ fantastic. Mike, where do we go from here, huh?”

By now Mike’s started staring down at the circular wooden door with its weird symbol carved into the center, and at that moment something seems to sort of… settle, in him. Determination, Richie thinks. Or maybe acceptance. He murmurs, “In the depths is where it crept. In the beneath, they find belief.”

Ben shoots a look at Richie. “Is he okay?”

Richie shrugs. “I think at this point that’s a relative question.”

“Mike,” Bev says, eyeing the door. “What’s on the other side?”

“I don’t know,” Mike admits, looking up at her, and then at all of them in turn. “No one does.”

And then, with no fucking warning whatsoever, he reaches down and yanks the door open.

“Woah, woah, woah!” Richie shouts, backing up, and he’s not the only one. Actually, all of them are saying some version of _what the fuck, Mike,_ from what Richie can tell. “Mike!”

Mike sits down on the ledge, his legs dangling right over and into the darkness below. He looks up at the rest of them, and says, “Okay! See you down there.”

“Mike!”

Too late. He’s already hopped down into the hole, and except for the glint of his flashlight against the cave walls flickering up to where they’re at, there’s no more sign of him.

“Fuck,” Bill mutters, running a hand over his face. “Okay. Stay together.”

He hops down after Mike, and then Richie — eager to put that pool of greywater behind him no matter what shitshow awaits him ahead — hops in right after.

It’s nothing like the well was. It’s not a straight drop a few hundred feet down to the bottom. It curves back and then to the left and then to the right, and soon enough, Richie’s gotta get down on his hands and knees to crawl behind Bill and find his way through the cave tunnel.

“Can you get through that?” he hears Bill shouting, presumably to Mike.

“It’s the only way! This way, it’s in here,” Mike answers, and a few seconds later Richie sees what they’re talking about.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Richie murmurs, dropping his forehead onto his arm for a second. The opening up ahead is, at best, a foot tall. Jesus fucking Christ. He lifts his head up and shouts, “You don’t happen to have a shrink ray on you, do you, Mikey?”

“The cave opens up on the other side,” Mike calls back.

“Just saying,” Richie mutters as he squeezes himself through the opening, angling his shoulders _just_ right so he doesn’t get stuck, “if I survived a werewolf and the fucking wicked witch of the west back there and then I end up dying ‘cause I got my ass stuck in a hole in some rocks, that’d be…” he trails off, grunting with the effort of squeezing his legs through, “… really fuckin’ anticlimactic.”

Mike wasn’t kidding about the cave opening up on the other side, at least. He and Bill are both there to help Richie to his feet, and he finds that he can actually stand up without hitting his head on the ceiling, so. That’s a plus. He cracks his neck, shakes out his legs, and looks up—

—and the kid’s there.

Frannie.

“Oh, shit,” Richie murmurs as, behind him, Bill and Mike set about helping Stan and then Bev and then Ben through the opening.

The kid’s maybe fifty yards ahead, standing right there in the center of a gaping opening where the tunnel ends and the _cave_ cave begins, facing away from all of them with her tiny silhouette framed in the greenish yellow light from the cave ahead.

Richie’s metal baseball bat is hanging from her right hand.

  
  
  
  


_We’re not letting you go this time._

_You hear me, asshole?_

_We’re not—_

  
  
  
  


_— ee hee hee ooh hoo hoo_

_oh but the time only comes around once_

_you hurt me… you_

_surprised me…_

_never_

_again_

  
  
  
  


_Yeah we’ll fucking see about_

  
  
  


_I am the one who called you back. I._

  
  
  


_Sure._

_You called, alright._

_But you weren’t the only one._

  
  
  


_ee hee hee, ooh hoo hoo, yes_

_your friend the Turtle, that right?_

_ooh hoo hoo, little naive baby Edsie_

_the Turtle’s long dead, Eddie Bear,_

_been dead dead dead all this time_

  
  
  
  


Richie shuffles forward a bit, carefully eyeing the cave and… _whatever_ that funky greenish light is coming from, and slowly, very slowly, the whole cave starts coming into view.

It doesn’t take long to figure out what the kid’s staring at.

“Oh, _shit,”_ Richie murmurs again, with fucking _feeling_ this time, because way out there, on the other end of a cave the size of a goddamn stadium, dangling some thirty or forty or fifty feet up in the air, is Eddie. Even from a distance, it’s impossible to miss him. It’s _Eddie,_ floating out there like Bev was all those years ago.

This is it, some reasonable voice says at the back of his head.

This is where it is.

This is where _It_ is.

He gulps, shuffles forward a little more, and whispers, _“Kid.”_

The others must all be through the opening by now, because he can hear all of them quietly following behind, even if he doesn’t tear his eyes away from the kid and the cave on the other side of her.

“Kid,” Richie tries again, just barely above a whisper. He carefully tip-toes closer and then whisper-shouts, _“Frannie.”_

It startles her, apparently — not that Richie can blame her in this fucking place — because she jolts and whips around and lifts up Richie’s baseball bat high over her head, looking like she’s just as likely to _throw_ the damn thing as she is to swing it, so Richie jerks back with his hands up in surrender.

“Uh,” Richie says. “Hey.”

The kid’s shaking, badly, and in Richie’s peripheral he sees Stan take a step toward her. _Dad mode activated,_ Richie thinks and wisely keeps his mouth shut, and Stanley says, “Fran, it’s—”

Nope. No go. Frannie lifts up the bat higher, clearly a threat to either throw it or start swinging, so Stan cuts himself off and doesn’t say anything else. The kid sniffles, and then, more firmly than Richie had expected with how bad she’s shaking, she tells all of them, “I’m not leaving! I’m saving my dad, and I’m not leaving, and you can’t make me!”

There’s a beat of silence, and Bev’s the first one to break it.

“Okay,” she says.

Frannie hesitates, then parrots, “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Richie agrees right away, because really, how the hell would they make her leave at this point, anyway? Climb back up the well and hope they can make it past the clown to get out of the fucking house in one piece? And leave Eddie here?

He shoots a glance at the cave behind her again, at the creepy jagged stalagmites rising up from the cave floor and casting long shadows on the walls, at Eddie, at— oh, fuck, okay. Eddie’s not all that’s floating out there. There’s all kinds of shit floating around him, too, rocks and junk and shit that Richie can’t quite make out from this far away. For fuck’s sake, who knows what kind of horror show’s going on over there?

He shakes his head, brings his attention back to the kid. One problem at a time.

“Yeah, I mean, why do you think we’re all here, huh?” Richie asks her. “We’re here to save your dad, too.”

“You were gonna _make me stay behind,”_ Frannie cries, raising the bat again. “You were gonna leave me alone and not let me come _help—”_

“We were,” Mike says, even though they definitely weren’t gonna leave the kid entirely alone, and even though Mike hadn’t even been there when they had this whole argument in the first place. “We were, and we were wrong. We’re sorry. Right, guys?”

“Yeah, sure,” Richie says, carefully eyeing the cave again. There’s… some kind of sound, he thinks, coming from the cave now. Unless he’s imagining it, but fuck, he’s not really willing to take any chances here. “We’re all gonna save your dad together, alright? Sound good?”

He very, very carefully slides another step forward, and then another.

Miraculously, the kid doesn’t raise the bat any higher this time. She doesn’t tell him to back off. Her lower lip wobbles.

“I tried to pretend I wasn’t afraid of anything,” she says.

“Yeah?” Richie asks.

Frannie nods, quick and shaky. “I _tried_ and— and it _worked,_ and the monster went away for a little bit but then I got in the house and there were those really scary rats again like— like at the restaurant, except they were _everywhere_ and I got so scared and then it just got _worse—”_

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s cool,” Richie tells her, taking another step forward, hands still up in surrender. “It’s okay.”

Frannie sniffs. “I _tried._ Really hard. But I was still scared.”

“You did good,” Stanley tells her. “You did really good, Fran.”

“Now,” Richie says, lowering himself down onto one knee when he’s within arm’s reach of the kid, “can I have my baseball bat, please?”

She sniffles again, eyeing Richie and then the others like she’s worried they’ll all turn on her in half a second, like they’ll haul her up and run her out of this place and leave her dad for dead if she makes the mistake of trusting any of them. But then, finally, her shoulders sag and she hands the bat over.

Richie could fucking cry, he’s so relieved. He takes the bat from her, sets it down on the ground, and says, “C’mere, kiddo.”

An instant later he’s nearly bowled over by the kid hugging the life out of his neck, and then Stan’s crouching down to join them, and then Mike and Bev and Ben and Bill join them, too, all six of them forming a protective barrier around Frannie for a second. Richie drops his chin on her shoulder, rubbing her back, his eyes hard on the cave behind her, on the swirl of floating rocks and junk, on _Eddie._

The sound from earlier is still there, he realizes.

It’s an odd sort of scraping sound, a _thump_ and a _krrrrrsh krrrrrsh krrrrrsh,_ and then:

_“Ooh, hoo, hoo…”_

Richie’s mouth goes dry. He feels the others all go tense around him.

_“… ee hee hee…”_

Ben’s the first to get up, walking around them and planting himself between the cave and the rest of them. Then Stan gets up, too, putting himself side-by-side with Ben.

_“… all the Losers together, they came for ME!”_

Bill gets up, too, joining Ben and Stan in forming a human wall between the cave and the kid. Frannie unwinds her arms from around Richie’s neck, but Richie keeps a careful grip on her wrist so she doesn’t go doing anything stupid. When Mike starts moving to get up, Richie stops him, too.

“Guys,” Richie manages to say, quietly enough that only they can hear. Stan looks over his shoulder to raise an eyebrow at him. “Guys, we can’t all fight it. One of us has to get Eddie.”

 _“… oh, I’ve_ **_waited_ ** _for you all for so long…”_

The thumping and the scraping sound both get louder, _thump-krrrrrsh thump-krrrrrsh thump-KRRRRRSH,_ and the clown’s voice gets louder, too.

 _“… all this time, I’ve_ **_dreamed_ ** _of you all…”_

Richie gulps, fumbles for the bat, and places it reverently back into Frannie’s hands. “Tell you what, I changed my mind. Hold onto this for me, will you?”

“Really?”

“Really. Bash anything that moves as hard as you can.”

Frannie nods with the seriousness of a soldier that’s been given a mission of the utmost importance, gripping the bat tightly in both hands.

“And whatever you do, don’t let Bill out of your sight, okay?” Richie asks.

Bill startles. “Me?”

Bev, somehow, seems to be on Richie’s exact wavelength. She nods and looks up at the others. “We’re gonna have to scatter.”

Mike nods, too, catching on quick. “Draw its attention away from Eddie.”

_Thump, KRRRRRRSH._

_Thump, KRRRRRRSH._

_Thump, KRRRRRRSH._

A part of the cave ceiling above them cracks and falls away, a huge chunk that _smacks_ into the floor and shatters into a thousand pieces.

“Uh, y- y- yeah,” Bill breathes, nodding like he’s psyching himself out for the world’s most dangerous babysitting job he’s just been saddled with. “Yeah, you just stick with me, okay?”

He reaches for her, and she takes his hand with the one not holding the baseball bat.

“Okay,” Bev says, “and everyone else—”

_Thump, KRRRRRRSH._

_THUMP—_

_THUMP—_

There’s a great _crash_ like a fucking car’s been dropped onto the cave floor—

And just like that, the clown’s right in front of them.

It’s not just the clown, though. It’s fucking huge, bigger than a goddamn car, bigger than a goddamn _building,_ and it’s leering down at them from where it’s wobbling up on massive multi-jointed legs like a spider’s.

“RUN!” Bev screams, and they do.

  
  
  
  


_Is it true?_

_YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO BE MORE SPECIFIC._

_Don’t fucking play dumb, asshole. The clown said you’re dead. It said you’ve been dead this whole time. It said you choked on a fucking galaxy. Is that fucking true?_

_THIS WHOLE TIME, EH?_

_That’s what it fucking told me! Is that why you couldn’t help us? Huh? You couldn’t have fucking led with that? You couldn’t have told me I was wasting my time hallucinating a— what, a giant fucking turtle corpse?_

_DEPENDS._

_What? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?_

_I’M DEAD._

_I’M NOT DEAD._

_DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK._

_OR… WHEN YOU ASK, TECHNICALLY._

_IT ALL GETS A LITTLE COMPLICATED WHEN YOU’RE THIS DEEP IN THE THREADS OF THE TAPESTRY, YOU KNOW?_

  
  
  
  
  


Richie dives to the left just as one of the clown’s spidery legs comes smashing down on the cave floor where he was kneeling down, shattering the rock into a rain of fucking gravel. Ben and Mike and Bev all run in different directions. Out of the corner of his eye Richie sees Stan sprinting right underneath the clown like the bravest, stupidest, craziest son of a bitch on the planet, while Bill sweeps Frannie along and ferries her toward an alcove around the right side of the cave, shielding her body with his as best he can while they’re running for their lives.

_“Ooh, hoo, hoo, making it fun for me, that’s good, that’s good…”_

Another _crash_ as one of the thing’s legs thrusts through the cave wall somewhere way above where Richie’s now stumbling along, hiding behind stalagmites every couple seconds, trying to bring himself closer to where he saw Eddie floating when he actually had a clear line of sight. A cascade of gravel and dirt rains down all around him.

_“… hide and seek with Pennywise, hide and seek with the Losers…”_

Richie presses his back into a massive stalagmite, his heart rabbit thumping in his throat. He turns, slowly, peeking out from behind his makeshift cover to try and see where Eddie’s at, and—

Fuck, the clown’s stomping around _right there._

Richie presses his back to the stalagmite again. Eddie’s still there, still floating along with a whole litany of junk and rocks and kids’ toys floating around him — which, _fuck,_ that’s creepy and horrifying and heartbreaking all at once, and Richie really hopes Bill doesn’t let the kid get too close a look at all that — but the _clown’s_ there, too. How the hell is Richie supposed to get past it? How the hell is he supposed to get to Eddie without getting fucking skewered by one of those legs?

How the hell—

“HEY!”

Richie jolts at the sound of Mike’s voice, freezing where he’s hiding.

The clown lets out an ear-piercing _shriek,_ and that alone is enough to get Richie to peek from behind the stalagmite again.

It’s stumbling backward, reaching up to cradle its huge misshapen head, growling low and angry like the werewolf all over again, and when it pulls its hands away from its face… Richie sees a deep red gash cutting through the white of its forehead.

And there, way down at the opposite end of the cave, Mike’s standing there with another rock in his fist.

Somewhere Richie can’t see, he hears Ben shout with a voice like a bullhorn:

_“ROCK WAR!”_

Another rock comes sailing from somewhere to the left, and then another from impossibly high up. Did someone find a path up into the cliffs lining the edge of the cave?

Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

Richie takes a steadying breath, locks eyes with Eddie floating up in the air about halfway between him and where the clown’s stumbling back and forth getting pummelled with rocks, and he _runs._

The clown swipes its legs around as it dodges and shrieks and tries to fight back against five (six?) opponents at once, and Richie’s forced to slide underneath one of them like he’s a fucking baseball player sliding into home plate, barely missing getting his teeth knocked in by, like, _three_ fucking inches, but it’s okay. He makes it to Eddie.

Sort of. Eddie’s still a solid twenty feet in the air.

Shit.

Richie looks around the cave floor by his feet — as if there’s gonna be a fucking _reacher grabber_ lying there for the taking, fucking Christ — but his eyes land on a fist-sized rock instead.

Well. Okay. That’s better than nothing, isn’t it?

He grabs up the rock, shoots a glare up at the clown, and throws it with everything he’s got in him. The rock sails through the air and smacks into the back of the clown’s head, and it whirls around and throws one of its legs forward to try and turn Richie into a fucking spit roast. Richie manages to dive out of the way just in time, landing heavily on the ground amidst another rain of crumbling rock and pebbles, his arms shielding his head.

Someone else must draw its attention away, because Richie has enough time to scramble up to his feet again before—

_KABOOM!_

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Richie shouts, stumbling back as a massive concussive blast rips through one of the clown’s legs like someone’s just detonated a mine under it. The explosion flares up red and orange, flames crawling up the clown’s leg and causing it to shriek again and flail around like it’s dying. “What the fuck was that?”

Up, up, up, way up on the other end of the cave and standing at the top of an outcropping of rock, Richie sees it: Bill and Frannie side-by-side, standing over the clown and getting ready to throw something else at it. Bill winds back his fist, throws, and—

_KABOOM!_

Another one of the clown’s legs goes up in flames.

“What the _fuck,”_ Richie hisses to himself, and then he shakes his head. Whatever. Fuck it. It still doesn’t matter.

What _does_ matter is that Eddie is, at best guess, maybe ten or fifteen feet above the ground now. The more the clown gets distracted, the lower Eddie seems to get. Or maybe it’s the more _hurt_ the clown gets. Hell if Richie knows, and hell if he gives a shit.

Richie stands up on shaky legs, grits his teeth, and takes a running leap at where Eddie’s floating. He reaches up and—

His fingers barely graze the bottom of Eddie’s shoe.

_Fuck._

“Okay, okay, come on,” Richie says, shaking out his legs and cracking his neck from side to side. “Come on.”

Somewhere directly ahead and to the left maybe — he’s gotten all kinds of turned around already — there’s another _KABOOM_ and renewed shrieking from the clown, along with a crash and the crackle of rock falling apart as the clown makes another attempt at fighting back.

Richie doesn’t pay attention to it. He drives his shoes into the ground, takes another running leap, stretches his arm as high as it’ll go, and he looks up and —

  
  


a deep, thrumming hum

a high pitched whistle in his left ear and

  
  


_white_

_white_

_white_

_white_

_l i g h t_

  
  


_( YIPPEE KI YAY MOTHERF )_

  
  


_( Check it out, folks. )_

_( You’ll believe a disc jockey can fly. )_

  
  
  


_Eddie? Eddie!_

  
  
  


_ooh hoo hoo ee hee hey_

_ohh big grown up Richie’s come to play_

_ee hee hee hee heeeeee!_

  
  
  


Richie has no fucking clue what’s happening, but it’s like— fuck, he doesn’t even know what it’s like. He had a bad acid trip once in ninety-five, and a few half decent ones in the early two thousands when he’d mellowed out a bit, and he had one hell of a cocaine habit through the late nineties, but shit, this is… 

Seriously, what the fuck is happening?

This is a darkness wider and deeper than he’s ever known, than he’s ever believed could exist at all, and he’s moving

_( oh he’s flying alright )_

travelling faster than the speed of light and being shaken like a goddamn chew toy in the mouth of a hyperactive Rottweiler. He can sense something up ahead, some titanic corpse looming up ahead in the darkness and

_( you’re very clever, young man, very clever, but )_

it’s flying past him at impossible speeds, but even as fast as he’s moving it’s as if the thing just keeps on going and going and going, and it’s like he’s sitting in a train car watching another train go by in the opposite direction, another train that’s so long it seems to eventually stand still or even to go backward, and

_( it’s turtles all the way down )_

he can still hear it, he can still hear It, the clown, yammering and buzzing, its voice high and inhuman and full of hate, but it’s amused and

_ee hee hee_

_won’t you stay and play with the clown, Richie?_

  
  


_Fuck you._

  
  


_ohhh now there’s no need to be afraid, Richie_

_( What if you’re not afraid of anything? )_

_I’m not._

  
  


_ee hee hee ooh hoo hoo_

_but I don’t think that’s really true_

  
  


Well, no.

It’s not true.

Not technically.

But hell, Richie’s spent a whole goddamn career faking it ‘til he made it.

Who’s to say he can’t use that for some good?

_Yeah, asshole, it is true!_

_I’m not fucking afraid of you, you’re just—_

_( a clown )_

_( a mimic )_

_( a fucking bully )_

  
  


_( a sad old woman )_

  
  


_( a tiny little mouse )_

  
  


_( a fake )_

  
  
  
  


_( just a stupid clown )_

  
  
  


_( a cheap copy )_

  
  
  
  


_( a clown )_

  
  
  


_( a clown )_

  
  
  


_( a fake )_

  
  
  


_( a stupid fucking clown )_

  
  
  
  
  
  


_stop it_

_no STOP IT_

  
  
  


_NOT BAD, SON._

_BUT I’D FINISH IT NOW._

  
  
  


_no no no no STOP IT_

_I am the Eater of Worlds you can’t_

  
  
  


_Oh, asshole, I think you’ll find I can do whatever the fuck I want._

  
  


_let me go let me go it hurts let me GO IT HURTS IT HURTS IT_

  
  


_( Richie? )_

  
  


_Eddie?_

_Eddie!_

His voice is so faint, but it’s there. Incredibly distant, incredibly far out in the black.

_— he’s gone he’s in the deadlights let me GO LET ME GO_

_( Richie? )_

_Hey Eds it’s me_

_( But I thought )_

_What, you thought I was gonna leave ya here?_

_( Rich I saw you die )_

_I’m here okay I’m not dead just grab a hold of me_

_— he’s dead, you’re all dead, don’t you see you’re too old, don’t you understand that? Now let me go, let me GO, LET ME GO_

  
  


_You know what? You take me to him and maybe I will_

_Richie wait what the fuck do you mean you’ll let it go_

  
  


Eddie’s closer now, so much closer and louder and a little bit angry, and that’s A-OK as far as Richie’s concerned. He can still hear the others’ voices thrumming through his mind and his ears and crawling up his throat

_( a clown a mimic a fucking bully )_

and he can feel the clown still screeching like a fucking banshee somewhere out in this black, and he realizes he’s doing it. _They’re_ doing it. Bill and Mike and Ben and Stan and Bev and Eddie and even the kid, too. All of them shouting the thing down, making it small, making it scared for the first

_( second )_

_( third? )_

_( WELL, THOUSANDTH, IF YOU WANT TO GET TECHNICAL )_

time in all of its long, long existence.

  
  


_Richie what the FUCK you can’t just let it go_

_I’m literally saving your life Eds are you gonna take my hand or_

_Richie we fucking HAVE it and_

_We do, we got it right where we want it_

_Well I’m sure the fuck not gonna let it go now_

_Yeah no shit, man_

_— LET ME GO_

Richie can feel it, finally, Eddie’s hand tight in his.

He starts laughing.

_— let me go you promised to LET ME GO_

Richie cannot fucking stop laughing.

 _Oh, I know,_ he drawls in a Deep South accent.

Somewhere in his voice are the echoes of all the others, of all the Losers shouting it down at once _( a tiny little mouse an old mummy a fucking mimic a worthless clown )_ but Richie just lets it happen. He tightens his hold on Eddie’s hand and keeps on laughing until his lungs burn.

_I know, I know, but honeychile… sometimes I lie._

The darkness yawns and widens and deepens, and then an odd three-pointed light swirls out of the darkness and grows and grows and grows, casting strange patterns over everything. Richie tightens his grip on Eddie’s hand and he thinks he can see him — just for a second he thinks he can see Eddie, his face overlaid with that same three-pointed light, and then, even stranger, he swears he can see all the bones and veins and capillaries in their joined hands, like they’ve been shot into the maw of the world’s strongest X-ray machine.

Richie feels the muscles in his arms stretching like taffy, feels the ball-and-socket joint in his shoulder creak and groan as the pressure builds up.

Shit.

Are they gonna make it out?

_Hey! Guys!_

_Pull us back!_

_PULL US BACK!_

  
  
  
  


“Oh, sh- shit.”

Bill can see it somehow. He doesn’t know how, and he doesn’t see it _completely,_ as if it’s happening on the other side of one of those grimy curtains in the Neibolt house living room, but he can see it.

Here, Richie and Eddie are each suspended in the air like Bev was all those years ago, their eyes blank white and fixed on those lights at the top of the cave. Here, Ben and Bev are on the opposite side of the cave — Ben looking like he’s just dug his way out of a muddy grave, Bev coated head to toe in what can only be blood — and they’re both shouting It down, screaming that they’re not afraid of it and they never were. Here, Stanley and Mike have both joined Bill and Frannie on the raised hill, throwing Pop Pop Snappers down at its legs like actual bombs and desperately shouting _you’re nothing you’re just a clown a mimic a fucking bully_ and watching it shrink down and down and down like a balloon with a pinhole poked in it.

But somewhere, somewhere else, Richie and Eddie are struggling to get back.

_( Hey! Guys! )_

_( Pull us back! )_

_( PULL US BACK! )_

“Shit,” Bill says again.

Then something taps him in the thigh.

When he looks down, Frannie’s holding the metal baseball bat out like a wordless offering, and all at once Bill feels something essential slot into place. Something twenty-seven years in the making, a debt long overdue. Two debts, really. Two crystal clear thoughts in the forefront of Bill’s mind, one in his own voice saying, _this is for Georgie, you son of a bitch,_ and the other ricocheting through his skull in the voice of a thirteen-year-old Richie Tozier.

Bill takes the bat, shares a look with Stan and Mikey — neither of whom waste a second in surrounding the kid and taking over the role of protector so he’s free to move — and then he starts carefully letting his sneakers skid down the slope toward the bottom of the cave.

The clown’s no longer towering, no longer the size of a building.

_“A CLOWN!”_

It’s eight, seven, six feet tall.

_“A FUCKING MIMIC!”_

It’s of a height with Bill.

_“A WASHED UP COPY!”_

It’s a foot shorter than Bill but it’s still snapping with jaws lined with razor sharp teeth, still swiping at Ben and Bev with claw-tipped spidery legs, still holding Richie and Eddie’s minds captive—

“Now,” Bill hears himself say in a voice that’s steady and unwavering, “I’m gonna have to kill this fucking clown.”

And he _means_ to swing the bat at the thing’s head. He means take its head clean off its shoulders, obviously that’s what he means to do, but as he speaks the clown twists, turns to look him dead in the face with its slack jaw and its wide bloodshot golden eyes, and some primal instinct takes him over. He raises the bat high in the air with both hands like it’s fucking Excalibur—

— and he drives it straight down into the clown’s open gullet.

There’s a scream that he belatedly recognizes as his own, and the crunch of bone snapping, and the soft squelch of flesh giving way under the baseball bat as he drives it down and down and down, spearing the thing like a spitroasted pig.

The clown lets out a sputtering whine, a sound that might be a protest, or a plea, but the words never get the chance to fully form.

It shrivels up and collapses, sagging to the ground with the finality of any old thing withering and dying. No fanfare, no spectacle, no shimmering magic light. Just a wheezing death rattle, and then silence.

Behind him, he hears someone — Richie, maybe — tumble to the ground.

And that, of course, is when the earthquake begins.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the word "fuck" appeared one hundred and thirty-two times in this chapter, putting the whole chapter at 1.3% fuck
> 
> do with that information what you will :)


End file.
